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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

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JoshTriplett·

> very little empirical evidence

Evidence is easy to turn up and cite:

https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/urgent-need-memory-saf...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/a-proactiv...

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/rewriting-a-browser-compon...

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FWIW, all of those links compare Rust to languages created before 1980, and are all projects largely and unusually independent of the crates ecosystem and where dynamic linking does not matter. If you're going to use a modern language anyway, you should do due diligence and compare it with something like Swift as the ladybird team is doing right now, or even a research language like Koka. There is a huge lack of evidence for Rust vs other modern languages and we should investigate that before we lock ourselves into yet another language that eventually becomes widely believed to suck.

Here's what Microsoft decided after a comparison to C#: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/31/microsoft_seeks_rust_...

Microsoft isn't going to abandon C#, it's just using the right tool for the right job. While there are certainly cases where it is justified to go lower level and closer to the metal, writing everything in Rust would be just as dumb as writing everything in C# or god forbid, JS.

I'm not claiming otherwise. I'm just saying that saving some hundreds of millions of dollars on compute is what Rust as a language can enable.

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