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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

> I've been a mobile OS developer for a decade now. Basically nobody uses Rust in the real world of firmware/kernel engineering.

You know it’s kinda funny, I read this comment and then tabbed over to twitter and then read this: https://blogs.blackberry.com/en/2023/02/this-is-the-kind-of-...

Anyway you’re not wrong that Rust is still a tiny portion of this kind of thing, but it is growing, and quickly. Only time will tell.

(I work at a company writing firmware (and virtually everything else) in Rust, but as a startup I don’t expect that to carry as much weight as big established companies, of course.)

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Man oh man. I realized I'd never even seen Rust code once in my life, so I loaded up some random Rust book and skimmed through it. I know HackerNews doesn't like half-informed angry opinions, so I'll just say "I really hope Rust never takes off" and leave it at that.

Not everything can be everyone's cup of tea :)

What about your brief skimming turned you off?

Don’t worry, that’s the same amount of research done as all the other complaints about rust.

Your loss. I tried three times to learn Rust and I had plenty of doubts, but 3rd time I struck to it and it took maybe a year before I would reach for Rust before C (I have 40 years of C muscle memory so that's saying something). Some things _are_ awkward in Rust (eg. occasionally the explicit "a[x as usize]" casts are tiring), but the payoff is awesome.

ADD: what finally worked for me was to not read the book [linearly], but instead jumping between tons of sources, lots of exercises, and generally not stressing about getting everything in all the [ample] detail. And of course doing it and doing it every day. I definitely still have lots of holes (hello async) and I'm not shy about Cloning/Copying liberally unless it really matters for performance.

Look on databases today.

Especially on that area of Posrgresql mutants: similar ideas came to a lot of great minds: yugabyte, neondb, cockroach DB, timescaledb, even Amazon (Aurora) an MS here.

They are trying to do different things but common: - they're all tweaking storage in very strange directions - compatibility with core postgres - importance on top (timescale is still an extension to PG) - they all trying to achive a goal of cloud-native DB

And one thing is common: Rust! (cocroachdb are still on golang but they are exception)

And if look what's going inside core postgres you will discover that almost all APIs of PG are duplicated in Rust so in future we'll see quite rusty PG

> And if look what's going inside core postgres you will discover that almost all APIs of PG are duplicated in Rust so in future we'll see quite rusty PG

What do you mean by this?

Even right now rust is quite adopted in PG community.

Looking on trend I expect that in near future it will be even more: - extensions - I expect rust to become first choice - core postgresql - I expect that rust to appear first in pg tools and then in postgres itself

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