> I've yet to come across anybody outside of the HN crowd that knows about or uses Rust. Interesting. High school students and university students that my kids

> I've yet to come across anybody outside of the HN crowd that knows about or uses Rust. Interesting. High school students and university students that my kids know are using Rust (in New Zealand, not some high-tech mecca). > Think of what I'm doing as explorative programming, I'm both trying to understand the problem and trying to solve it at once. OK. I might recommend Julia then. > It is interesting that you recommended Rust and not say Java which has pretty good performance, is memory safe and is in production for well over a decade, for this particular use case I would choose that over Rust. Sure, Java sounds like a fine choice. I didn't know much about your requirements when I suggested Rust. People often choose C because of strict performance or deployment constraints, which Java often can't meet, which makes Rust often a safer recommendation. > There isn't a month or we see an announcement of the next point release of Rust on HN. That's because they release every six weeks. That doesn't mean the language is unstable or you will keep having to make changes to your code. It means there's a steady flow of incremental improvements that preserve backwards compatibility. > you seriously believe that writing a new project in C is irresponsible (which smacks of FUD, and is one of the reasons why I think Rust is one of the more toxic language communities on the internet, I have never seen a Java proponent use that kind of language) In hindsight I shouldn't have mentioned Rust at all. I do sincerely believe that propagating C code is irresponsible and the software industry needs to recognize this. It sounds harsh, but I think that's partly because software developers have historically taken too lightly the consequences of their choices (even for hobby projects). People like me who are zealous about the industry moving away from unsafe code tend to be big Rust fans, because Rust finally makes that possible for the systems/embedded domain where C/C++ were for such a long time the only viable option. I guess we have skewed the Rust community to some extent. Mea culpa. > it smacks of 'you should do as I do' rather than that it is the best for me. When we write code and distribute it, we have an effect on the world, and then I think it behoves us to consider more than just "what is the best for me". For hobby projects where the code is never distributed, these issues are mostly moot ... though it's amazing how often such projects escape sooner or later.