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I’ve never seen a community put so much effort into building an ecosystem as Rust. They have working groups for everything, they’ve slowly won over some extreme

I’ve never seen a community put so much effort into building an ecosystem as Rust. They have working groups for everything, they’ve slowly won over some extremely high profile programmers, and they’re taking on the areas of computing that are the hardest to solve as a manually memory managed systems language. Hats off the team, and I’m excited for all the game changers that are still in the pipe like the faster debug compiler. After a lot of languages that are just rehashes of what we’ve already seen, or just a different subset of features, Rust is a languages that actually feels like it’s from the future that's finally going to start moving us forward after a lot of stagnation in industry while PL theory has continued to move forward. If you haven’t given Rust a shot yet now is the time. You can get rust up into the top ten. :}

pjmlp 8y ago
For us the GUI story, support for COM/UMP and binary libs still need to improve.
RandNOx 8y ago
I wonder how this would look like taking into account language-specific user forums. I do not know about other languages but the Rust users forum is very active. The popularity on StackOverflow is probably dragged down by this, although I do not know to which degree.
blub 8y ago
Me neither, but that effort's not visible in their rankings, because it's not even in the top 20, nevermind top 10. At the end the day it's platforms that move languages, not posting on HN and reddit. They quite brutally damned Rust with faint praise in the article: "It’s also worth noting that even if Rust never gets much beyond where it is today, it’s still ranking higher than well known languages such as the aforementioned Clojure and Groovy, as well as CoffeeScript, Dart or Visual Basic. Not bad for a systems language." Ranking higher than VB...
- barking 8y ago
  VB6 is still going strong. As answers to most vb6 questions are available on the web since forever, people rarely ask vb questions on stackoverflow. If you look at vbforums.com you can still have 500+ people at any time viewing the "vb6 and earlier" forum. And that's just one of many vb forums.
  - blub 8y ago
    We should define "going strong"? MS basically killed it, in 200x when the VB.NET snafu happened. I assume 100% of the VB work is legacy at this point and since solid architecture or design principles were never this language's strong points, it can't be particularly exciting legacy work either. It's basically a career and technological dead-end.
    - polygotdomain 8y ago
      You could say the same about COBOL. Just because it's "dead" doesn't mean that businesses don't have tens to hundreds of thousands to even millions of lines of code hanging around in these "dead" languages. While it may not be exciting work, not every programmer is looking to do the latest and greatest thing that will appear at the top of HN. They make good money because the business knows paying someone well to maintain it is better that paying a team to rewrite it. That's why one of the issues with COBAL programmers is retiring and passing on, not leaving to go to a NodeJS shop.
      - dTal 8y ago
        Yes, and if they'd said Rust was more popular than COBOL, that would also have been damning with faint praise.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  These ranking aren’t something to take very seriously. They are ballpark estimated at best, and a better measure is growth of the community and adoption in larger open source projects that people actually use.
hackerpacker 8y ago
Or, the evangelicals can give it a rest for once. You realize this is an ordered graph, not a scaled map, right? Still not ready to listen to a bunch of judgmental people over trivial improvements who only throw shade on everyone else at EVERY opportunity.
golergka 8y ago
I use Rust almost exclusively for my side-projects now, and it has given me (as a guy who spends 2 days to find the Right Way to do a thing because this one hand-waved line in a tutorial just gives a bad smell) much joy and taught me a lot, but as professional, slow adoption in the industry makes me nervous. I have decent experience and background in my current tech stack to easily find a well-paying job, but if something happens to it, or to particular industry it's relevant to, I want something to fall back on; I've seen too many developers drift into a comfortable numbness of stagnation (ActionScript, anyone?). And yet, Rust jobs are extremely rare, and each one attracts a lot of VERY motivated and skilled candidates eager to start writing Rust full-time; and quite frankly, while I think that I'm a decent developer, I don't consider myself among this 1%. So, I'm curious: how does HN see this situation going forward? Where will Rust find widespread industry adoption, and what can Rust community do to bring this forward?
- chetanbhasin 8y ago
  The thing about getting comfortable is rust is that even if the entire ecosystem burns up in ashes, you can still get a decent job switching to C++. Learning and using rust makes you a good systems programmer in general, not just at Rust. Having said that, I don't think the rust ecosystem is going to go up in flames anytime soon, but lack of professional application at the moment doesn't bother me too much.
- blub 8y ago
  I'm not so sure that it will find widespread industry adoption. I've been eyeing job boards for 1-2 years now, looking at what kind of Rust jobs are available: there's few of them, mostly start-ups. Furthermore, as you mentioned, there are many very motivated candidates competing for those jobs. Some bigger companies are supposedly using Rust (Amazon, Google, MS) on some projects, but these companies have so many things going that they are likely to use most languages in some kind of project. I've also heard that there are several "invisible" Rust jobs, only available through connections - but these are irrelevant IMO. And then there are the jobs where one is obviously not using Rust, but they mention it to score points or dangle it as a possibility. Until I see a strong market for Rust skills, or my own employer offers interesting Rust projects, it doesn't make sense for me to invest beyond learning the basics. Funnily enough I'm looking into Go now - its job market is one-sided and quite anaemic, but it offers some nice technical benefits and is a piece of cake to learn.
profalseidol 8y ago
> PL theory has continued to move forward. It did? Can you link me to the new stuff?
sureaboutthis 8y ago
I didn't know this was a contest. Can we bet money?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  People keep forgeting programming languages are software products just like anything else.

pjmlp 8y ago

For us the GUI story, support for COM/UMP and binary libs still need to improve.

RandNOx 8y ago

I wonder how this would look like taking into account language-specific user forums. I do not know about other languages but the Rust users forum is very active. The popularity on StackOverflow is probably dragged down by this, although I do not know to which degree.

blub 8y ago

Me neither, but that effort's not visible in their rankings, because it's not even in the top 20, nevermind top 10. At the end the day it's platforms that move languages, not posting on HN and reddit. They quite brutally damned Rust with faint praise in the article: "It’s also worth noting that even if Rust never gets much beyond where it is today, it’s still ranking higher than well known languages such as the aforementioned Clojure and Groovy, as well as CoffeeScript, Dart or Visual Basic. Not bad for a systems language." Ranking higher than VB...

barking 8y ago
VB6 is still going strong. As answers to most vb6 questions are available on the web since forever, people rarely ask vb questions on stackoverflow. If you look at vbforums.com you can still have 500+ people at any time viewing the "vb6 and earlier" forum. And that's just one of many vb forums.
- blub 8y ago
  We should define "going strong"? MS basically killed it, in 200x when the VB.NET snafu happened. I assume 100% of the VB work is legacy at this point and since solid architecture or design principles were never this language's strong points, it can't be particularly exciting legacy work either. It's basically a career and technological dead-end.
  - polygotdomain 8y ago
    You could say the same about COBOL. Just because it's "dead" doesn't mean that businesses don't have tens to hundreds of thousands to even millions of lines of code hanging around in these "dead" languages. While it may not be exciting work, not every programmer is looking to do the latest and greatest thing that will appear at the top of HN. They make good money because the business knows paying someone well to maintain it is better that paying a team to rewrite it. That's why one of the issues with COBAL programmers is retiring and passing on, not leaving to go to a NodeJS shop.
    - dTal 8y ago
      Yes, and if they'd said Rust was more popular than COBOL, that would also have been damning with faint praise.
ilovecaching 8y ago
These ranking aren’t something to take very seriously. They are ballpark estimated at best, and a better measure is growth of the community and adoption in larger open source projects that people actually use.

hackerpacker 8y ago

Or, the evangelicals can give it a rest for once. You realize this is an ordered graph, not a scaled map, right? Still not ready to listen to a bunch of judgmental people over trivial improvements who only throw shade on everyone else at EVERY opportunity.

golergka 8y ago

I use Rust almost exclusively for my side-projects now, and it has given me (as a guy who spends 2 days to find the Right Way to do a thing because this one hand-waved line in a tutorial just gives a bad smell) much joy and taught me a lot, but as professional, slow adoption in the industry makes me nervous. I have decent experience and background in my current tech stack to easily find a well-paying job, but if something happens to it, or to particular industry it's relevant to, I want something to fall back on; I've seen too many developers drift into a comfortable numbness of stagnation (ActionScript, anyone?). And yet, Rust jobs are extremely rare, and each one attracts a lot of VERY motivated and skilled candidates eager to start writing Rust full-time; and quite frankly, while I think that I'm a decent developer, I don't consider myself among this 1%. So, I'm curious: how does HN see this situation going forward? Where will Rust find widespread industry adoption, and what can Rust community do to bring this forward?

chetanbhasin 8y ago
The thing about getting comfortable is rust is that even if the entire ecosystem burns up in ashes, you can still get a decent job switching to C++. Learning and using rust makes you a good systems programmer in general, not just at Rust. Having said that, I don't think the rust ecosystem is going to go up in flames anytime soon, but lack of professional application at the moment doesn't bother me too much.
blub 8y ago
I'm not so sure that it will find widespread industry adoption. I've been eyeing job boards for 1-2 years now, looking at what kind of Rust jobs are available: there's few of them, mostly start-ups. Furthermore, as you mentioned, there are many very motivated candidates competing for those jobs. Some bigger companies are supposedly using Rust (Amazon, Google, MS) on some projects, but these companies have so many things going that they are likely to use most languages in some kind of project. I've also heard that there are several "invisible" Rust jobs, only available through connections - but these are irrelevant IMO. And then there are the jobs where one is obviously not using Rust, but they mention it to score points or dangle it as a possibility. Until I see a strong market for Rust skills, or my own employer offers interesting Rust projects, it doesn't make sense for me to invest beyond learning the basics. Funnily enough I'm looking into Go now - its job market is one-sided and quite anaemic, but it offers some nice technical benefits and is a piece of cake to learn.

profalseidol 8y ago

> PL theory has continued to move forward. It did? Can you link me to the new stuff?

sureaboutthis 8y ago

I didn't know this was a contest. Can we bet money?

pjmlp 8y ago
People keep forgeting programming languages are software products just like anything else.