Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepriverfish | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see how popular Zig is becoming, I thought it would get overshadowed by Rust and it would go nowhere.

View on HN

It's interesting how much Rust has slowed down. There is still some development in linux otherwise people seem to be over it. I think Rust just doesn't offer enough in terms of features, and is overshadowed by languages like Go or C++ in terms of what developers are really looking for. Rust's popularity seems to be dropping or holding steady in indexes like TIOBE, and a lot of big "influencers" seem to be over Rust's hype cycle

> Rust's popularity seems to be dropping or holding steady in indexes like TIOBE, and a lot of big "influencers" seem to be over Rust's hype cycle

It is correct that the hype is past its peak, however, the TIOBE trend (if one wants to use that) is actually steadily increasing.

> There is still some development in linux

"Some development" is a miscarachterization - the official addition to the Linux kernel itself is a very big deal, and its adoption is increasing and will continue to do so.

I think that Rust has found its niche in safe low-level programming, and it will slowly have an increasingly dominant role in (although the ceiling of this area is certainly limited in the global landscape).

Rust has been adopted by Microsoft, Amazon, etc. It's past the hype phase and well into the "languages people use for work and complain about" phase.

I still like it -- for systems programming, that is. It's a much better C++ basically.

> I still like it -- for systems programming, that is.

Just curious, what language(s) do you prefer for things that you don't classify as "systems programming"?

Go and TypeScript are both nice.

Here's my 2 cents - a programming language (or any technology, smartphones, LLMs etc) has a honeymoon phase - during which everyone's excited about it and extols its virtues and focuses on how different it is from everything else.

Once that's over, people start looking at it with a more pragmatic eye - how much better is this really than what I had before. People start focusing less on the gimmicks and more on everyday usability.

For a programming language to be really popular, it needs that something that captures people's imaginations, but ultimately the stay power is determined by how useful it turns out.

Kotlin and Swift are very practical, but never had any wow features, so they never got hyped, they just quietly got more popular. Go had it with its green threads and channels, but nowadays most people seem to be not using those that much (I don't think there are a ton of instances of Go processes in prod with 10k threads), but otherwise its a solid language.

Rust - it's a solid language as well, and an improvement over C++ in some aspects like package management, but it's borrow checker and programming style is divisive.

Thing is, unlike goroutines there's no avoiding the borrow checker, so a lot of people don't really commit to Rust.

> Go had it with its green threads and channels, but nowadays most people seem to be not using those that much (I don't think there are a ton of instances of Go processes in prod with 10k threads)

Err..this is incorrect. Some projects who scale to 10k go-routines on a single instance regularly are loki and CockroachDB. Even your common NATS server can scale 5k+ go-routines on single instance and it is not uncommon.

> It's interesting how much Rust has slowed down

Rust has a SDK from the 3 big cloud providers, Rust IS mainstream.

> Rust's popularity seems to be dropping or holding steady in indexes like TIOBE

Oh, 14th [1]. That's a lot lower than I would have expected, based purely on the amount of noise surrounding Rust.

[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

There appears to be a lot of noise in the Tiobe already. What does it mean if Visual Basic is shooting up and C is near the top? They are surely in no way measuring the same programming market -- so who cares?

Rust is #10 on the PyPL (PopularitY of Programming Language) https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

But PYPL has shown Objective-C rising to #4 in the last few months....

Think it's a matter of if a person is limiting themselves to an evangelistic echo chamber. If one confined themselves to only HN, likely to get the impression from the enthusiastic fans of Rust and Zig, that they ranked #1 and #2, where in the real world that's definitely not the case. Languages like C# (#5) and Golang (#11), rank way above Rust in the real world, but get way less shine than would be expected. It's like being a heretic, for even mentioning Object Pascal (#8), Ada (#17), or Kotlin (#20) around here. Yet, all those rank above Zig (#49). Hell, Vlang (#41) is ranked above Zig on TIOBE (November 2025).

I feel like I'm on another planet here. Basically every new piece of software in my space (DB/query engines/streaming engines) is being written in Rust these days. There are like three production projects, total, written in Zig.

Same! I feel like I'm on crazy pills. Multiple folks in this thread are saying stuff like, "yeah, Rust, cool, but it has zero use". How are Linux, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, Firefox, Python's `cryptography`, etc., not real use?

Rust is targeted at strategically important systems (proxies, databases, OSs, VMs, hypervisors, high-throughput servers, cryptography, browsers) and by any measure is making significant inroads into those kinds of systems in real industrial applications, and I'm to believe that Rust adoption is languishing? Am I going insane?

But they are not even competitors.

Zig is a better C. No abstractions. Close to bare metal.

Rust is a better C++. Abstractions to simplify application level programming.

I hear this a lot, but there are many things for which you can use both, so they're competitors. Also most Rust developers want to use it everywhere, including areas where you normally reach out to C, so if people that like Rust want to use it for things that are usually made with C, and Zig is a replacement for C, it seems to me they're competitors, no?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com