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Comment by skobes | Hacker News Reader

> And the problem with Rust is that it just doesn't have critical mass and, frankly, I don't think it will ever have.

Isn't this premature? Rust is still pretty new.

It is premature. And furthermore, adoption will mostly be driven by new projects written in Rust, not conversion of C/C++. That takes time.

At the risk of dating myself, I suspect the author of that self-described rant either has forgotten how long it took for C++ to mostly dethrone plain C, and perhaps practically more relevantly, how painfully long it took for new versions of C++ to be widespread enough that people dared to rely on them. This stuff isn't easy at scale; adoption is slow.

Doesn't mean rust will ever grow like that, but merely slow adoption doesn't sound like a death knell by itself to me.

100% this. It's still absurd to me how codebases in some industries are still basically C++98 and haven't even begun to transition to at least C++17 (which forces new code that adds or changes features to be written C++98-style as well).

Hard to imagine those companies switching to a different language anytime soon. Maybe the new US government push towards "memory safe" languages will help with that.

>Maybe the new US government push towards "memory safe" languages will help with that.

That could be a whole new year 2000 thing. It would get the programming world out of the doldrums it seems to be in at the moment.

It's not that new; nearly 10 years old now I think. Go's adoption was faster

I think Go thrives in a much more popular field (web services, etc.) and it's also designed to be easy to pick up so I'm not surprised this was the case.

Isnt the first stable language version from 2018?

May 2015.

1.0 was in May of 2015, but that was closer to an MVP with stability guarantees than the full language. It wasn't until 2018 that Rust was as usable for most tasks. Everything you might have learned back then is still available, just a lot of restrictions have been removed, and there are more to come.

> Isn't this premature? Rust is still pretty new.

The old lady said both those things to me this week. In two different conversations.

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