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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Inertia is going to keep C and C++ going for a while. The ship takes a long time to turn and it just started turning in the past couple of years. It's probably more accurate to say that individual ecosystems might become Rust-dominated in the coming years but "most" is maybe a tough call.

Like: I wouldn't be surprised at all if most (new) linux drivers were written in Rust 5 years from now, and software like git and systemd and pipewire and LLVM and maybe even Postgresql had started to adopt it. And I basically expect that Rust will be completely dominating internet-facing software like servers, browsers, media parsers and the like within 10 years.

But I'd be pretty surprised if Rust had more than 20% penetration in automotive / aerospace firmware, or gamedev, even 10 years from now.

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By total LoC owned, sure. I would be completely unsurprised if 20% of major companies in those industries have significant components written in Rust within a decade. It's been a long time since there was this much language interest within the embedded/safety critical domains.

Penetration into those domains has still been pretty brutally slow. AFAIK only Volvo is shipping Rust code, in 2 models of car, and not for anything safety-critical yet.

That's not a demerit to Rust, just a testament to the conservatism of those industries.

I'm aware of Rust code in various states of "development/experimentation" within GM and Toyota, as well as rust applications that might already be in your home if you've purchased any expensive, brand name appliances recently. It's slow, but happening.

I worked in the automotive space (CAD/CAE/CAM) and there was tons of code that had commit headers starting in 1996 - the year they moved the previous code base into that particular VCS. Plenty of files had less than 10 commits to them since.

They still had some FORTRAN in the code base. According to my coworker who worked there for 25 years, his first project at the company involved the initiative to replace FORTRAN with C.

So yeah, there's plenty of C code hanging around that's not going anywhere.

I wonder whether Rust will stick similarly because that's just how things go, less because now the migration process has been tested and the system is more flexible as a while or more because it's really pretty good enough this time.

Yeah embedded software strikes me as one of those areas where rust can really shine (and where the cost of a crash can be high esp. if you run close to bare metal).

And until then someone might create a more ergonomic evolution of Rust.

> And until then someone might create a more ergonomic evolution of Rust.

I wouldn't discount Rust's ability to create a more ergonomic evolution of Rust, because they already have. A few times. See: Polonius, https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius, and NLL, https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2094-nll.html

This is a thing I've been wondering about for a while. How many people are exploring the general design space of safety, but from the ground up, so that they aren't tied to the set of design decisions Rust made? At one point MS had Verona but I have not heard anything about it in years so no clue if it is still actively being worked on/explored.

Rust is a good language IMO, but the industry cannot just stop there and decide this is good enough. Even with ideas like editions, there's a level of breakage Rust isn't going to do.

Ada?

In my opinion, Ada needs some better tooling to become accessible.

Though I'll have to give the Ada LSP a go again, hoping that it plays nicely with JetBrains' suite.

>> And until then someone might create a more ergonomic evolution of Rust. > Ada?

Um what? Which is to say -- how is Ada more ergonomic, if ergonomic means "relating to or designed for efficiency and comfort in the working environment"? I'm curious about what advantages Ada has there.

Ada has a more traditional syntax compared to Rust, for good or for bad.

> Ada has a more traditional syntax compared to Rust, for good or for bad.

How do you mean? "Traditional" in the sense that Pascal and Ada are old, and Rust is not? Rust may be ML in C's clothing, but isn't C's clothing more ergonomic for most C/C++ types?

I wished Rust had developed as an ML in Pascal/Ada's clothing but as you said it would not have been ergonomic for C/C++ folks and probably not as successful as it is.

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