But genuine question, is Rust ever going to catch on in the mainstream? It seems to have a bunch of nice to have features and great optimization. But the pick up, from what I've seen, has been less than stellar.
While at work I'm doing more software development I originally studied comp. eng. and dabbled around quite a bit with embedded systems, mainly in C, ASM and tinyOS with its nesC dialect+framework. Rust is a god send in lots of areas there too, you can establish zero-cost (well some compile cost, but zero runtime ones) contracts and static guarantees with the type systems, like disallowing that code that would produce a register pull up/down configuration with a short-circuit from happening, or shared access to resources can also be done in such ways. Check the respective chapter of the rust embedded book for more info:
https://docs.rust-embedded.org/book/static-guarantees/index....
I'm not sure where you've gotten that impression. Rust is mainstream at this point. All the big companies (e.g. FAAMG) are using Rust. Lots of large products are: Firefox of course, but also, parts of AWS, npm, VS Code, Android. And even key infrastructure products like Linux are looking at integrating it.
Rust requires a higher cognitive cost than C# or Python, but doesn’t provide massive improvements in the areas most relevant to enterprise developers (ORMs, JSON serialization, SDKs, etc…)
Any company that does try to work with Rust today in any vertical slightly outside of what is considered "mainstream" will likely end up having to write their own libraries for things that are already available in other languages, but that's a factor of the ecosystem's age.
I know depending on boost or qt might be really easy, but the amount of different toolsets you must know to depend on randomlib is too damn high. I wish though that it doesn't end up like npm, I also hope there'll be some kind of "meta standard library" which integrates different mainstream building block libraries into something that's easy to consume coherently.
Which isn't to say Rust is never the right choice for those, it's just a more complicated question that's highly project-specific. Which is why it isn't mainstream there like it is in other places.
I'd venture to say that to be considered mainstream a language has to at least pass 1% threshold in Tiobe index (or the equivalent in Redmonk or others).
If Rust is mainstream, then Fortran is über mainstream
Rust will likely end up in a similar place - enormously useful in its niche, foundational for infrastructure outside, and with enough uptake and stability to make a career out of. I don't think anyone expects it to eclipse popular dynamic languages for web development, but it might make inroads on C and C++ in areas where active development is still needed.
(And FWIW Rust is #26)
The interesting thing I'm observing[0] is that embedded developers aren't wasting any time waiting for hardware manufacturers to do anything about Rust because they know manufacturers...well, let's express it as: "just don't care about software".
Bluntly, regardless of whether it's perfect or not, Rust is currently pretty much the only hope for devs who are desperate to move on from C for embedded work and if they have reverse engineer every last proprietary bitstream, protocol & application they will.
It's not just about the language itself (which depending on one's perspective has both pluses & minuses) but also the ecosystem/tooling (e.g. libraries with `no_std` support, build/test/doc systems, etc). (And, from my perspective, the community from which this has all grown--and why.)
Maybe it won't succeed but it won't be for lack of trying. :D
Also, one of the interesting aspects of Rust for me is how broad the domains of application are--using the same language from microcontroller level, through UEFI/firmware, OS, applications, & web is pretty appealing and leads to easier migration between domains.
[0] Including in a comment a few comments down from this one (when I first read it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001985
In the software space, rust is being used by quite a few companies [0].
Additionally, I use vanilla VS Code and rust analyser so no need to use manufacturer supplied lock-in IDEs. There are many compiler targets to choose from for cross compilation and tools like probe-run to flash chips.
One major issue is lack of manufacturer provided code examples written in Rust. For that I rely on the Rust community. A typical example being nrf-hal for Nordic Bluetooth chips.
And honestly, I've been toying around with an Actix web server written in Rust, and the experience is not bad. As someone new to Rust, the main pain points have been along the lines of figuring out how to type a parameter to accept both a database pool and a database transaction (which turns out to be quite hard to figure out). Other than that kind of friction, the experience has been nice.
If you want to try out rust for web, check out this project: https://github/wulf/create-rust-app
I believe it will catch on as soon as people realize it's a C performance with modern syntax and memory safety mitigating most of the security flaws and bugs introduced by mismanaged memory.
I fell in love as soon as I saw descriptive scalar types like "i32".
If anything, the hype-train might make it seem like it's a more mature ecosystem than it really is. The questions to ask are, what's causing the hype, and does the product deliver.