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Rust is probably here to stay seeing as it was picked up by Firefox. I still think it could have been done better, but perfect is the enemy of good enough.

mmoez 7y ago
So was said about Java 20 years ago... Yet no one dares today post a "X in Java" anymore on HN.
- smolder 7y ago
  And was probably said about Fortran and C. Our tools are getting better. I can only hope Rust becomes so widely used that I can recommend big companies use it since they'll have a trillion developer hiring pool.
zozbot234 7y ago
Rust wasn't just "picked up" by Firefox - it was developed by Mozilla for the very purpose of using it in the "next generation" of Firefox technologies. (The original Rust project as designed by Graydon Hoare was even quite different from the Rust of today, e.g. the C/C++-like focus, with little ot no runtime, is something that only came about around the Rust 1.0 release.)
- vertex-four 7y ago
  Note that Rust intentionally lacks some features that would be useful for Firefox development (e.g. developing for the DOM involves object inheritance which isn’t present in Rust), so it’s not like it’s designed to solve exactly their problems and nobody else’s.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Rust has inheritance and polymorphism.
    - vertex-four 7y ago
      Rust has trait inheritance, but not object inheritance. Servo uses code generation and macros to get around this. (I’m literally writing an operating system in Rust, I know what I’m talking about.)
      - heavenlyblue 7y ago
        Could you elaborate on how trait inheritance is different from object inheritance?
        zozbot234 7y ago
        "Trait" inheritance is just interface inheritance, which is indistinguishable from composition+delegation. It doesn't have the pitfalls of actual implementation inheritance, which essentially involves an extra "trick" of dispatching on the actual type of your object even when calling base-class methods. It's not that Rust cannot do this - heck, people do it all the time in C. But it has to be done by writing things out explicitly, it's not automatic in any sense. And for good reason - letting base-class code access methods that have been redefined in a derived class can create all sorts of pitfalls when you're not very careful about what that implies.

mmoez 7y ago

So was said about Java 20 years ago... Yet no one dares today post a "X in Java" anymore on HN.

smolder 7y ago
And was probably said about Fortran and C. Our tools are getting better. I can only hope Rust becomes so widely used that I can recommend big companies use it since they'll have a trillion developer hiring pool.

zozbot234 7y ago

Rust wasn't just "picked up" by Firefox - it was developed by Mozilla for the very purpose of using it in the "next generation" of Firefox technologies. (The original Rust project as designed by Graydon Hoare was even quite different from the Rust of today, e.g. the C/C++-like focus, with little ot no runtime, is something that only came about around the Rust 1.0 release.)

vertex-four 7y ago
Note that Rust intentionally lacks some features that would be useful for Firefox development (e.g. developing for the DOM involves object inheritance which isn’t present in Rust), so it’s not like it’s designed to solve exactly their problems and nobody else’s.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Rust has inheritance and polymorphism.
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    Rust has trait inheritance, but not object inheritance. Servo uses code generation and macros to get around this. (I’m literally writing an operating system in Rust, I know what I’m talking about.)
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      Could you elaborate on how trait inheritance is different from object inheritance?
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        "Trait" inheritance is just interface inheritance, which is indistinguishable from composition+delegation. It doesn't have the pitfalls of actual implementation inheritance, which essentially involves an extra "trick" of dispatching on the actual type of your object even when calling base-class methods. It's not that Rust cannot do this - heck, people do it all the time in C. But it has to be done by writing things out explicitly, it's not automatic in any sense. And for good reason - letting base-class code access methods that have been redefined in a derived class can create all sorts of pitfalls when you're not very careful about what that implies.