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Comment by 02020202 | Hacker News Reader

02020202

Rust is the language that everyone loves to talk about but no one really uses.

Been using it professionally now for over four years successfully and getting paid for my work.

I'm using it right now while getting paid for it. In fact, my client suggested that we use Rust, and I was happy to comply.

Edit: This is far outside the Silicon Valley bubble, in a rather conservative industry (a very large German car parts supplier, though my code won't end up inside a vehicle).

Sorry, can’t help but guess. Bosch?

Ha, I suppose I was more specific than intended ;-)

Except Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Mozilla, Dropbox, npm, Discord and a whole bunch of other companies.

They do use it, but it is snowflake projects versus what they invest in C++, with seats at ISO C++ table and resources contributing to clang/LLVM, alongside their own in-house produced languages.

So it is more like having one tool more in the toolbox than anything else.

At least at Facebook, Rust usage is definitely not "snowflake projects". Last I heard, there's an entire team dedicated to Rust Developer Experience, and several pieces of extremely core Facebook infrastructure are now in Rust. This includes the front-end for Hack (the compiler for PHP that powers the vast majority of Facebook), Eden/Mononoke (the source control/file system manager at Facebook), and Libra (that weird blockchain thing).

Those sound big and important but they are a tiny drop in the bucket of FB infra.

Note in particular that it’s mostly developer-facing infra. The vast majority of production infra - the stuff actually running on all those thousands of servers - is still all written in C++ or Hack.

Certainly true. But far better than most "niche" languages.

So they have replaced OCaml with Rust on Hack?

The front end, yes. Some people are very unhappy about it, but other people think that there are 10x people interested in working in Rust vs OCaml.

I don't know if they're planning on changing the rest of the compiler to Rust - wouldn't be surprised if they did.

I see thanks.

In these big companies, one can find pretty much any language being used somewhere.

Rust as a language is mature and pretty stable.

However, the ecosystem... not so much. Pretty much every crate is still at version 0.x, with breaking changes happening constantly. Major dependencies get abandoned.

What is often overlooked is that Rust projects have a very high maintenance cost. Once a project has been written, keeping all the dependencies up to date is a lot of work, that often requires complete rewrites of parts of your applications.

I more or less abandoned a hobby project because of this dependency bitrot. I was using a library that was using a lot of generics/traits and Tokio 0.1.

The dependency upgraded to Tokio 0.2.x and I whenever I spend a few hours trying to fix the compile errors I end up giving up. I like to write code to get things done and I don't take pleasure in the extra complexity that Rust brings.

You mean the Silicon Valley bubble of reality distortion. It's become so far disconnected from the information technology industry that it's rapidly becoming irrelevant. Outside, in the trenches, one won't find much Rust. Or Haskell.

Every one of those companies have extremely robust business models (ok npm I have no idea about), high profits and are not going anywhere. You are mistaking them for loss leader unicorn startups.

Rust is present in quite a lot of spaces. But companies outside sillicon valley or even the US do not advertise what they are doing as much.

I am as far from SV as possible and a fulltime Rust dev.

You need to consider most of those companies are so big they probably use every one of the top 20 languages. You argue as if they were ONLY using Rust.

No, but they are using it in critical parts of some key products, and in those parts, Rust is enabling them to write better code that requires less maintenance.

On the opposite side of the world (Melbourne Australia), we’re seeing More and more people use Rust at work. I personally know about 8 local companies using it in production

These companies have a combined market cap of over 7 trillion dollars. They are the trenches.

That's nonsense: the trenches don't revolve around webshit and advertisers, but solving real problems of an average company, day to day problems.

"solving real problems of an average company, day to day problems" - like providing Windows and Mac computers to employees, and providing cloud computing / server services?

Far from it. Has nothing to do with that.

Just to throw some anecdata back at this overly broad statement, I use Rust full time at work and maintain some embedded crates with moderate download numbers. I suppose I mustn't exist then?

Languages, spoken or computer, are adopted following the laws of natural selection, learning curves matter. A lot. It's preferable to have 2 passable developers than a very competent one on a new awesome language.

If C or C++ cannot evolve because of backward compat, those language might naturally evolve to adopt features of Rust or haskell. C++ Lambdas are a good example.

It seems that C++20's concepts are a viable candidate to compete with rust safety mechanism.

>It seems that C++20's concepts are a viable candidate to compete with rust safety mechanism.

No, that's not really something that concepts do. But there are ways of coding and tools using which you can get closer to Rust's safety features in C++. E.g. https://www.modernescpp.com/index.php/c-core-guidelines-life... or https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ThreadSafetyAnalysis.html.

So do you mean there are 11 kinds of programming languages: the ones people discuss about, the ones nobody uses, and Rust?

There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand the above summary and those who don't. Those who understand the above summary also understand binary.

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