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Comment by marta_morena_29 | Hacker News Reader

Why would you mention Swift, Go and Rust in the same context? I mean Swift vs. Go kinda has some merit, although they have completely different intentions. At least Go doesn't aspire to be a systems programming language. Rust definitely has no place in this comparison. Rust serves a niche market of systems programming that is so security focused that C/C++ just won't do. It's not useful for anything else (at least not anymore than Haskell is useful for anything besides university projects, in the real world at least).

Swift has many nice similarities with Rust and other current languages from a pure syntactical/language perspective, while aiming to be a GP language. It definitely serves a broader audience than Go, whose main target is server programming. Swift's main target is Apple UI programming, however, the language is capable of so much more.

Which is why Open Source is good news. It may make it escape its Apple box.

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Why the cheap swipe at Haskell? We use Haskell very productively in the real world. You can take a look at some of our blog posts here, if you want to learn more: https://tech.channable.com/

Here is one post about writing an Aho-Corasick implementation in Haskell which is as fast as the fastest Rust implementation: https://tech.channable.com/posts/2019-03-13-how-we-made-hask...

I strongly disagree with your view of Rust.

While it’s true that Rust shows promise in security and embedded, some of the early adopters have been in the server side and microservices.

I'm exploring Rust in embedded (for fun-time projects), and there is a lot of activity across the programming spectrum. I think Rust has a good story for anyone doing multi-threaded programming and values correctness.

>Rust serves a niche market of systems programming that is so security focused that C/C++ just won't do. It's not useful for anything else (at least not anymore than Haskell is useful for anything besides university projects, in the real world at least).

You could call Java is niche for the same reason. Some of us want to write native, low overhead code in a language that has a sane design (only disparaging C++ here). It's about time C++ had more alternatives.

What do you mean by "so security focused that C/C++ just won't do"?

Anything on the internet should be cautious of memory unsafety issues. Something like an image processing library I won't consider 'security focused' yet I would trust one written in Rust over one written in C.

Harsh words. I agree with the statement, but Rust is used not only for system programming and Haskell has its niche beyond university.

I think Swift is where .NET was in its first decade. While capable of so much more, it is limited by its designers and primary purpose so it cannot go beyond. The tight coupling to UI products is a burden an ecosystem carries. Java won in the backend not with is UI, JavaScript with node/npm before Angular reset the frontend and C# just when .NET Core pushed it into spaces it has not been before (apis, lambdas, etc).

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