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A language is more than just a technology: it's an ecosystem of libraries, platform APIs, developer mindshare and experience, familiarity, legacy codebases, pro

by _bxg1 6y ago

A language is more than just a technology: it's an ecosystem of libraries, platform APIs, developer mindshare and experience, familiarity, legacy codebases, product support. Don't discount the weight of all of those auxiliary, human factors. Rust, culturally, comes from the web. That's why it has the most traction in the web server/WASM space for now. It's starting to poke its head into Systems use-cases because of the sheer weight of its memory safety benefits there. Maybe in a few years it'll get some real use in the games industry (real industry; not just enthusiasts), though Unreal remains a bastion of C++ that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But then there are some dark corners of C/C++'s territory that move even more slowly, and where the cultural shift will take a long time. I think to a great extent, embedded falls into that category.

timw4mail 6y ago
Not really. While there is a growing set of web-based application for Rust, it's not like PHP, where the very purpose of the language is the web. Rust is a system language before it is a web language. WASM as a target is actually a great indication that it's a system language -- performance is a primary consideration.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  You're missing the point. The point is that Rust came from Mozilla. Its mind-share started with web people and is expanding from there. What I'm trying to get across is that those social forces can matter more for adoption than just the tech's appropriateness, considered in a vacuum.
  - setr 6y ago
    In that case, it came from Mozilla for working on a web browser, with primary goals of security, building sandboxes & language runtimes (js), and replacing an application-level cross-platform C++ core. Which is very different than "web people", which in my mind implies webdev -- html/css/js + API server/db/caching backend. Which also further explains why WASM is so far along (sandbox, security), much better than any association with webdev itself; but not kernel-level system development. (But if the web browser is an userspace OS... then it's probably not that far from it)
    - type0 6y ago
      Off course it's a system language, there are even some that try to build an OS in Rust https://www.redox-os.org/ https://www.redox-os.org/
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Everyone is targeting WASM nowadays.

by _bxg1 6y ago

timw4mail 6y ago

Not really. While there is a growing set of web-based application for Rust, it's not like PHP, where the very purpose of the language is the web. Rust is a system language before it is a web language. WASM as a target is actually a great indication that it's a system language -- performance is a primary consideration.

_bxg1 6y ago
You're missing the point. The point is that Rust came from Mozilla. Its mind-share started with web people and is expanding from there. What I'm trying to get across is that those social forces can matter more for adoption than just the tech's appropriateness, considered in a vacuum.
- setr 6y ago
  In that case, it came from Mozilla for working on a web browser, with primary goals of security, building sandboxes & language runtimes (js), and replacing an application-level cross-platform C++ core. Which is very different than "web people", which in my mind implies webdev -- html/css/js + API server/db/caching backend. Which also further explains why WASM is so far along (sandbox, security), much better than any association with webdev itself; but not kernel-level system development. (But if the web browser is an userspace OS... then it's probably not that far from it)
  - type0 6y ago
    Off course it's a system language, there are even some that try to build an OS in Rust https://www.redox-os.org/ https://www.redox-os.org/
pjmlp 6y ago
Everyone is targeting WASM nowadays.