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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

The more pressing question: What is Rust and why is it so popular on HN?

I did an internet search for Rust jobs and it was near-zero. Would be nice but reality calls.

Weird, I did a search and I found 13,000 jobs mentioning Rust on Linkedin.

It's kind of how like when Go first bust out on the scene and every org that was "doing DevOps" claimed they had "Go in the building", the reality is you wrote CLI scripts and did 90% of your job in Java or Python. They may mention Rust, but doubt it's what you'll be solving the majority of business problems in.

At Commure we use Rust everywhere, from our backends to our cli tools. Any shell script longer than a few lines becomes a binary. The only place we don't use Rust is in the frontend, where we use JavaScript and TypeScript.

I didn't a search in Indeed and found jobs like:

- machinist

- maintenance worker

- crater/packer

- painter

I wish there was a better name, still better than go, although they successfully adopted golang so now it is easier.

Can't edit now, but of course "didn't" supposed to be "did".

I just saw my first local, non-blockchain Rust opportunity, but sadly had to pass on it due to other obligations. Everyone I know writing Rust these days is introducing it to their orgs - not waiting for an open position.

That's how I got Koltin going at my job before it was official with Google.

Not everything has to be about employability. You can still write code to scratch a personal itch, or for the pleasure of the craft.

But actually a lot of the big tech companies are using rust, they’re simply not advertising jobs.

it's like 8 pages just for SV on indeed

You don't look for Rust jobs. You rewrite your current job in Rust. :D

Rust is over the "100% hobbyist" phase, but it isn't still in the phase where you hire "Rust developers" verbatim. There's an important phase in between: Rust is being introduced in organizations as we speak, and some people that were originally hired for some other skills, develop in Rust they picked up because they were enthusiastic about it.

I am in that position at the moment. We are a multi-language shop, and there's some components that make sense to write in Rust.

I'm in the same spot. Given the large number of companies who are willing to state that they use Rust (https://www.rust-lang.org/production/users) without being able to find openings that are explicitly for Rust, I'd say you're right.

People like to believe that the biggest problem they have with their code is memory safety, a problem Rust puts a significant effort into solving. At this point, most uses of Rust are also entirely academic, which appeals to HNs because they prefer theory to reality because reality is messy.

> At this point, most uses of Rust are also entirely academic

At this point, this is not true. There are significant production deployments of Rust. Heck, Rust code helped me post this comment, and read yours! (Okay that's strictly not true because I have Chrome on this computer, but had I posted from my phone, or from my other computer, it would have been Firefox.)

I don't think it's fair to say that Rust is entirely academic. It has a lot of production users including some very large names: https://www.rust-lang.org/production/users

I didn't say that Rust was entirely academic, I said most uses of Rust were academic.

You have any stats to back this up?

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