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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> Why would I then base a development project on Rust, if there's neither a spec nor an alternate implementation? This is strictly worse than what we have now.

This is a double standard. C was created in 1972 and standardized in 1989. A major C compiler (MSVC) doesn't even fully implement C99 from 21 years ago.

C++ itself was created in 1985 and standardised in 1998. Yet it was adopted.

Yes, things have changed and the bar has been raised. But people don't seem to have followed your reasoning even for C and C++.

> Apart from kernels and drivers (where Rust seems an outright no-go)

Why? From what I've read Rust can actually help with managing hardware resources through its semantics. What blocks it from being used?

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Having an international standard behind a language gives it a certain weight that can't even be compared to the ad-hoc structures that are seen in other projects.

It enables experts in different areas from different countries to come and work together under a set of specific rules that are much stronger that words written in wikis or repos. It also makes it clear that the language is designed for the long term and is not under the control of a single party (as was the concern about e.g. Mozilla which the Rust community tried so hard to dispel).

It avoids embarrassing transitions like Python's 2->3 or one corporation taking control of a language like Oracle did with Java by simply buying it. It avoids having to watch a language go extinct because its corporate sponsor wishes it so (Objective-C, VB 6) and many other such unpleasantness.

This is partly why this AWS focus is strange to say the least. I would have thought that it's obvious for the Rust community that having one large sponsor is not healthy. This tells me that Rust was never really as independent from Mozilla as claimed and Mozilla refocusing away from it seriously hurt the language.

Yet Python and Java have been around for 30+/25+ years and are some of the most popular languages around.

Not many people care about standardization, it seems.

I don't care so much about standardization as about choice, though, which is what standards tend to create, or the formation of standardization bodies tend to document. C is simple enough to create a compiler from scratch in less than a year (as proven by Tiny CC), but sinking your precious time into a behemoth like Rust (or other language-to-rule-em-all with open research problems) is on another level altogether in terms of commitment. As the language hasn't finalized, can change at any time, only people with inside knowledge of Rust will be able to work on such projects. Others will have to take a significant risk of their Rust code base becoming obsolete, or Rust simply imploding due to lack of new devs outside the inner circle able to pickup. Which makes Rust an irrational choice in the presence of alternatives.

I find the Rust complexity comment quite funny in a world where C++ and Perl 5 are around and they even managed to release Perl 6 :-)

Yes, that's almost 5 years ago now. But please note that since then, it has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). You can check out the Rakudo Weekly News (https://rakudoweekly.blog/blog-feed/) if you want to stay up-to-date on developments.

Do you have some sort of Perl 6 alert for HN? :-p

I know that it's been renamed, but I think you agree that it's still a very complex and powerful language.

It's logical to be concerned about complexity in a specific thing even if there are other complex things in the world. That should be self-evident.

Yeah, but his argument was directly coming from a C/C++ perspective, which makes it at least a bit... strange.

I was comparing directly against C. There's no such thing as "C/C++".

One doesn't need standardized tools to get things done. One doesn't even need correctness, performance, privacy, etc as can be seen from a multitude of very successful projects.

But it's there for those that really need it and personally I like it because it shows what we can achieve when a massive group of experts from all over the planet gets together and they nurture a project over many decades which has to work for such a broad set of use cases under the most strict and diverse of requirements, from avionics to mobile apps, physics simulations to cutting edge video games, medical devices to smartwatches and so on.

These two languages have contributed so much to what we have achieved and they're part of our digital heritage. Maybe that's another reason that they had to be standardized, so that they belong to everyone. :-)

Java has a standardization process, it just happens not to be ISO, it is still driven by multiple companies and at each release written documentation comes out.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/index.html

https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/1

> one large sponsor

Where is this coming from? I’m also worried about AWS over-representation in the Rust community but they’re far from the only significant corporate sponsors at this point.

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