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arpanetus

i hope i aint being toxic

but i wonder what if the same db was written in c++, would it get a post in HN?

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In this case i'd say yes. It's a DB purposefully written for learning, with good references and documentation.

However if it was just another DB.. especially one competing in an area no one really feels deficient, prob not.

Nope. But that’s just the way things go. At some point rust will either be boring or gone.

Remember when clojure was going to take over the world?

I used to think so too. I re-started learning Rust, after giving up in frustration twice. I try to learn new languages roughly 1-2 times a year, (over the last decade and half). I am from Python + JS background for more than a decade and PHP for half decade before that. C/C++ in college days.

Rust has some ideas that are pretty easy to see as to why it guards developers. It is not an easy language. It is surely a systems language and allows you to dig deeper into every aspect. You can roll your own implementation for anything to fit the need - want async in resource constrained platforms? Go ahead, write it.

But the guards are helping you think code that has less errors. It is an idea built into the language. But it is not the only thing* that sells it - the tooling is fantastic for systems language. The community is second to none. It is 10 years old now and only getting started - Linux, Microsoft and other big camps are giving it a chance - this has not happened in languages history at this level other than C/C++.

So yeah, give it a try and you will see why.

I’m old enough to remember when java was the hot new language. It was legitimately exciting—-memory safety, speed, and reasonable cross platform support among other things. Eventually it became boring, not because it failed but because it succeeded. Maybe that’s how rust will go.

Do people excited about the new thing go over the top and upvote anything even tangentially related to it? Yes, I think you need to admit they do. Is that the worst thing in the world? No, certainly not.

You are right Java succeeded. But not in the way that I see Rust is heading. I learned Java in early 2000s, not because it was a nice language to learn, but jobs were in it. I remember hating the entire process, the smell of Enterprise in everything.

In Rust, most talks I watch are tiny games, graphics and visualizations, emulators, language interpreters, some web (every language must it seems), experimental databases, kernels, lots of rewrites of other system software... Almost nothing I see in general is production focused, forget enterprise.

These are all from learners, hundreds of people falling in love with the language and the community. I have been in software for almost 2 decades, 15 years of them professionally. I have not seen this in a language that is also slowly going mainstream. Maybe I am wrong, but I am willing to bet a good chunk of my next 10 years to Rust.

Rust will not replace lots of code in Python (my main language), for example. Taking parts out and optimizing them in C++ is something I would have never done. I would do it in Rust. That gives a systems language huge appeal to tons of developers from the top 10 non-systems languages.

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