I’m always impressed that Rust turns people into such devoted evangelists after relatively little experience with it. This is a testament to its quality.
Rust might be great (I don't know) but this aspect of the community makes me less likely to try the language, not more.
( I didn't care a bit about this aspect when I approached Rust )
How so?
You need to invest a lot more to use the tool well, but then the tool can do a lot more.
> but then the tool can do a lot more
Can it? How do you measure that Rust/C++ do more than JS/TS given that they're used to solve completely different problems?
That's a whole paradigm shift from using languages that are only fit for a given application domain.
We’ve had basically no alternative other than C, with a lot of failed attempts at half supported C++. A lot of us suffered the horrible experience of working with severely lacking C++ compilers in the embedded space. Unless you were working with ARM or on top of linux, C++ was a bad idea.
Pretty much until ARM, support was terrible.
Most of these changes are small paper cuts that make sense to fix, but they’re breaking changes so they need to be opted into explicitly.
For example, earlier use a field x of struct b in a closure would capture the ownership of the whole of b. In rust 2021, the closure will only take ownership of b.x. This makes sense, but it’s a breaking change and therefore it needs an opt-in.
The Edition system is one of Rust’s biggest strengths IMO. Some languages never make breaking changes be enough if they’re small because it would break too much code. Other languages make breaking changes but expect users to migrate, placing a burden on them. The Rust edition system leaves it up to the user, on a per-crate (package) basis. Staying on the old edition is perfectly acceptable, as is moving to the new one.
Further reading - https://doc.rust-lang.org/edition-guide/rust-2021/
Plenty of 'C++ people' have been doing C++ for decades.
It was a new ecosystem trying to figure itself out, and it takes quite a few attempts to do that. Both react and vue are near 10 years old, express is over 10 years, so it’s not “new and shiny” chasing.
Rust will go through the same thing before the dust settles.
I quite like several languages I learned, Java, Python, even C# is rather nice in some ways, others didn't make a dent, Scheme I had actually forgotten until I was asked about old Scheme code I wrote, ML was nice but too abstract for me... I am learning PowerShell at the moment for some reason, I can't say I'm fond.
However I never had any inclination to go back and rewrite software. The software already works, why change language? But I've already spent a bunch of time doing that in Rust because it's so much nicer than the C I wrote a lot of software in previously.
It's not just the language itself, which is pleasant, the tooling is excellent as well. I spent part of Sunday pair-debugging a friend's Perl AoC solution (it worked for the test input but not real inputs, that's a fun story) and they lamented that early on they'd forgotten to have revision control. When you ask Rust's cargo for a new project, it automatically creates you a git repository (if git is available) for the project, and if you didn't say you're making a library it gifts you a "Hello, world." example program to start with.
The error messages are excellent. The developers actually put effort into further refining the already excellent error messages. After a long day writing SQL Server queries for which the response is typically "Syntax error" if you got anything wrong like this is still 1975, it's really nice to write a line of Rust that's wrong and have the compiler explain why it's wrong.
The documentation is lovely. The official documentation for the standard library is in the exact same style as auto-generated docs for your own code. Because why wouldn't you do that? Java more or less did this and I appreciated it then, but writing such docs for Java is much more painful, and yet the results are less useful. C# is similar. I believe Swift got nice documentation behaviour in a recent version but I don't know Swift.