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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

That tweet really blowing things out of proportion. Migrating one project, out of presumably many thousands, is not “going all in”. It’s still interesting though.

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Yup, there is probably more Perl project at Apple than Rust ones.

That would explain a thing or two about iCloud.

I mean, Perl is 32 years old.

That's how you build hype though. I like Rust (haven't used it in years though) but the marketing hype-train is one of the most effective I've seen - perhaps other than Java in the olden days.

When it comes to Rust it seems to be organic, not an orchestrated effort.

It is mostly webshits heralding it as if they learnt computer science by knowing difference between stack and heap.

Especially the ruby and javascript communities are very popularity-obsessed.

Popularity means lots of library support and beginners resources. Those are valuable when trying to learn new languages.

Most large companies typically have a bunch of primary languages/frameworks, so IMO there's never really such a thing as going all in. Unless you're FB and you're stuck with PHP/Hack.

That said, I think it's safe to say - this tweet is a sign that Rust is gaining traction at Apple. It might end up influencing others at Apple to consider Rust as an option and evangelize it within.

Yeah I've definitely found it's much easier to persuade a team to use some new technology if you can point to another team that is already using it. Nobody can say "we can't use Rust in Apple because X" because you can just say "but team Y is already doing it so that can't be true".

FB also uses Rust.

The difference here is that Apple is the originator and primary influence for a language that it markets as being applicable to the same use cases as Rust.

That said, as has been pointed out, this seems to be one team making a technical decision for their own work.

From speaking with friends who work at AWS, Amazon sounds pretty “all in” on Java. i.e. their server side code is very dominantly Java. I believe Netflix’s backend is pretty dominantly Java too, other than their edge API.

IMO, having one dominant server side language (with of course some small bits written in other languages) is about as common at a large tech company as being truly polyglot, where you can’t point to a single language used in the vast majority of the BE.

When I worked at Microsoft I wrote ActionScript...

Nobody ever accused us of going all in on Flash.

The Rust community is really overboard with the cheerleading sometimes.

"rust community" is not a single organism.

I also think we should understand someone was probably quite excited to see something they liked taken seriously by a company they respect. Maybe in their excitement and rush they user hyperbole.

This is not the first time rust crowd is being hyperbolic.

Someday, someone is going to release in a program in Rust that automates deleting your Facebook account, and things will go crazy.

Isn't this the only way a programming language can gain wide adoption now?

Rust is the CrossFit of programming languages.

> ...and building new functionality primarily in Rust.

In no way does that imply that the whole company is doing so, just that one team.

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