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Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

Rust is such a niche language still that I'd consider it a red flag if I was an investor.

You would make a bad investor if you can't recognize the writing on the wall.

Which is?

That Rust has rapidly gone from niche language to powering projects at some of the biggest names in technology, and will almost certainly continue to increase in that marketshare.

https://foundation.rust-lang.org/members/ just look at the companies that are a part of the foundation.

IMHO: Rust is going to be very very popular on everything from embedded to client-side web apps.

Headlines like the one on this submission makes me think "finally, someone has started to write that thing in a sensible language".

I very much hope Rust becomes popular in the embedded space... but other languages are better for apps IMO.

I'd rather use a click listener with TS/Kotlin/Swift than be forced into idiomatic Rust's architectural workarounds.

This project made the right call, using TS for the client.

To be fair, as a Rust fan I think Kotlin and Swift definitely do better in app development still. They have a lot of good language features and their communities are stellar.

I don't insist on everything being Rust. But it gets very close in many areas IMO.

That Rust is gaining both mind-share and market share.

A lot of the HN folks wage meaningless language wars that are a distraction from the actual success elements of Rust: namely that it removes a class of bugs by the mere virtue of your program compiling. Add to that a stellar quality and very dedicated community, sprinkle amazing tooling on top (semgrep filters, tree-sitter support, code-generation libraries) and it is a clear winner. Hence, "the writing on the wall" comment.

From HN and several other forums, plus a few companies I worked in, plus some meetups, I got the impression that the chief factor of slowing down Rust's adoption are a lot of C/C++ graybeards on influential positions that have an axe to grind against it and never bother to give actual technical arguments in a discussion. Unproductive and somewhat juvenile but hey, people being people.

That, plus the mind-boggling amount of C/C++ code that has to be rewritten should the world accept Rust as their successor is, shall we say, a very valid reason for its adoption to not be super fast. (And a fairly valid reason at that.) This problem sadly still exists. But with the Linux kernel starting to pay (some) attention to security problems, I have hope that such efforts will begin sooner rather than later.

Would you say that Rust's learning curve is also still an obstacle to widespread adoption?

It was a while ago, but I haven't asked around lately.

I'd say so, yes, but it's definitely easy to start with it and use it just fine before you have to delve deeper.

So a more apt comparison would be that you can use it on, say, 5 to 8 levels, and you could be absolutely fine on each of them.

It does require a bigger upfront investment for sure but it's not as big as many claim.

What makes it niche to you? It's got quite a strong foothold now in a lot of major companies, and projects.

Just look at the numbers.

What does that mean? The numbers show that a lot of companies are using Rust. Which numbers do you think make it seem niche?

The numbers show that Rust has ~2% market share compared to Js/Ts/Java/etc it is nothing.

I would consider it was a interesting flag if I was an investor. Many startups choose languages because of the benefices that they have, I cant see discord as it is nowadays without Elixir for example.

But obviously, some startups choose because its cool, this ones you shall avoid.

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