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Comment by pingsl | Hacker News Reader

I have the same opinion.

The best thing about rust is that rust attracts more people to learn systems programming languages. And thus, there will be more system programmers.

Nowadays, young people favor application programming far more than system programming.

But the problem is there are not that many system programming opportunities.

Then they decided to rewrite the existing systems with rust. We can find a lot of these examples on GitHub. Who knows if it is just a moment of enthusiasm, and how long will it last?

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My hopes is that Rust will result in more user-facing applications being written with the light weight, responsiveness, and performance of low-level-optimized code (no GC pauses, less allocation churn, easy safe parallelization, no segfaults unlike C++). Applications used to be written in C (and even RollerCoaster Tycoon in assembly), and GC'd languages are easier to develop in but slower to run on the user's computer. I'm not sure how successful Rust will be, since it discourages using multiple ownership or refcounting, and doesn't supply garbage collection, in situations where it is the easiest way to reason about code. IMO this raises the bar and discourages even working in these domains. (In my experience gtk-rs is more frustrating and confusing to use than unsafe Qt in C++.) And given Rust's tendency for dependency bloat, the applications don't come out as small on-disk as possible.

We will probably see some support for "pluggable", localized GC in Rust once it gains proper support for arenas/local allocators. This should make it easier to use Rust in domains where GC is pretty much a requirement, such as computing with general graphs.

Executable bloat in Rust applications is generally due to a lack of "idiomatic" support for dynamic linking (.dll or .so objects). You're expected to pretty much write your own interface layers using the C ABI, and it's especially hard to make these "interface" layers play well with generic code, which is quite ubiquitous in Rust.

As someone who mostly enjoys cpp, for me the math just didn't seem worth it to really get fluent in rust. I agree there are less system jobs than app jobs kind of prima facie, but there's not exactly a lack of systems jobs for cpp programmers at the moment.

C and C++ are effectively immortal at this point. This is due to the fact that they've been king of the hill in systems for decades. Effectively the only choice for that domain. If you enjoy C++ more power to you. But there are those like myself who have experienced writing code in e.g. Python and Haskell and with those backgrounds find C and C++ especially unpalatable. This is part of why there's so much excitement for Rust - it has many of the features application programmers are used to (such as package management via Cargo) and is also proven capable of competing with C and C++. That's never happened before.

There is also another reason, domains where they are the only game in town, e.g. HPC, and any newcomer needs decades to get into the club.

As for not happening before, Delphi and Turbo/Object Pascal on the PC and Mac worlds beg to differ, unfortunately C++ adoption from the OS owners pushed them away.

> Who knows if it is just a moment of enthusiasm, and how long will it last?

This is one big problem for me, too. I don’t think those young kids have any clear idea on what they are doing. I’ve seen the same thing happening with Python in the past. Heck, I remember some kids who went far enough to use python as their default shell. Such enthusiasm, but pointless. It took almost 10 years since the beginning of the Python hype until it actually dethroned Java.

Same for Rust. It does have a fine edge - I’m tbh excited a little - but that’s just it. Rust taking over the world? It will only after people got tired of calling it cool.

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