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I'm curious what people think about Rust as a long-term investment from an employment/job perspective. Is it going to pay the bills for the next 10 years? I've

I'm curious what people think about Rust as a long-term investment from an employment/job perspective. Is it going to pay the bills for the next 10 years? I've been using PHP for the past 10 years, and I've never run out of work. I can't say the same about Elixir, which I very much like, but the job market proved to be scarce. Just wondering what Rust's future looks like. Thanks for your opinions A note(since I notice my comment is getting downvoted): I've actually been spending time regularly for the past few weeks reading multiple tutorials, and getting familiar with Rust's concepts, and I really like the language and I can see that a lot of work has been put into developing it. But my concern is that there are other languages as well that have a solid background (OCaml, Haskell, to name a few), but that are still niche languages and suffer from the same scarce job market opportunities. Which proves that adoption does not always depend on how good a language is.

est31 5y ago
From a long term perspective I'm not worried but short to mid term it might cause some issues because currently there aren't that many Rust jobs yet. It's kind of a niche still, jobs wise.
- dragosmocrii 5y ago
  Thank you, this is reassuring!
habitue 5y ago
Rust has been picked up at Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. I think that gravitational pull is going to keep Rust a going concern for a long time. That being said, it's an investment in the future mostly. There aren't anywhere near as many Rust jobs as PHP, Java, or Python jobs.
- joatmon-snoo 5y ago
  Rust at Google is in a bit of an awkward state. There's a bunch of teams/projects that have used it, but we haven't yet staffed a team to manage an internal Rust toolchain/ecosystem. The most recent one was Kotlin, in large part because our Android ecosystem was increasingly having to play catch up, so we'll see if/when a Rust team gets staffed.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  While it has been picked at Microsoft, its relevance on the Windows developer eco-system is quite tiny. It remains to be seen when it will even have a place on VS installer.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  Rust has been adopted by multiple teams at Palantir. The bootstrap launcher for Palantir's ancient government software was rewritten in Rust to avoid having to ship Java 6. And some small piece of the custom software that Palantir wrote for BP to manage oil wells was written in Rust, because the single dev on the project was also a maintainer of some Rust crates and could get away with it.
nicoburns 5y ago
As a long term investment, I think it'll be great. I expect it'll be another 5-10 years before it's as employable as C++, but it'll last at least another 20 beyond that.
- oblio 5y ago
  Once/if it reaches that point, and considering its main niche (systems software), it will outlive roaches.
fioawjpoifajio 5y ago
I've never thought of myself as a C++ dev (or a PHP dev, or Rust dev, or Haskell dev). I write computer programs. I don't "invest" in a language and only take jobs that use that language. Learning more languages is almost always good. Not because you're learning more languages, but because you're learning more modes of thinking which will apply to any future language you learn.
- est31 5y ago
  I agree but many job postings contain stuff like "3+ years of professional experience in language x".
  - abzug 5y ago
    Yes but with time you gain experience in one or more languages and you can choose a job with the ones you like (or tolerate more). You don't need to pick or specialize one to apply for this kind of postings.
  - azdle 5y ago
    Honestly as someone (on the team) hiring for a job where someone else wrote the job posting, ignore the number. Just read that as "do you think you enjoy maintaining a codebase written in X". Job postings are the fucking worst.
  - void_mint 5y ago
    I've never actually found that to be enforced. None of my jobs have shared a tech stack, all of them have included such language. YMMV of course.
    - oblio 5y ago
      They don't enforce the number of years, but they could ask you quite deep questions about the language. Even if you're a senior Python/Javascript developer, with experience in C# in the past, etc., if they start grilling you about Ruby, you probably won't prove that you're as equally productive as a similarly smart dev that is an actual senior Ruby dev.
brundolf 5y ago
Probably depends on what you want to be doing Do you want to work in systems, embedded, etc? Rust is almost certainly (at least a large part of) the future Web servers (at the application level)/native apps/games? It's gotten some traction, but the jury is still out
- arecurrence 5y ago
  Rust is rather painful compared to alternative choices for web servers today. I’ve had to write 10x the code in some circumstances for the same result and I find it becomes hard to reason when you have several async types. However, it has attributes that match it extremely well with function as a service where memory usage, cold start times, consistent execution, and compute costs are major factors. It’s extremely well suited to that environment. I expect to see it thrive here once some aspects of rust settle down further.
  - brundolf 5y ago
    Yeah, the web framework situation is also just fairly early right now. Rocket looks promising but it's not at 1.0 yet, and the current release still requires the nightly compiler. It does a whole lot to improve the ergonomics, but even then it's not as easy as Python or Go. So it depends on the usecase. The good news is that the microservices trend makes it easy to optimize the "hot services" with a different language than what you use to throw together all your normal services.
    - akiselev 5y ago
      I wouldn't call it as "easy" as Python or Go but I've been writing production services off the Rocket master branch (all async and compiles on stable rust but the API itself is rather unstable) for the last few months and it's been easily as productive as Django (sans ORM & django-admin integration). 80-90% of my logic is in request guard implementations and diesel types/helpers which get reused all over the place, making the controller logic trivially simple. Reimplementing most of the bells and whistles took less time than trying to decipher Django's magic anytime it goes wrong. Rocket's DI and middleware layer with serde, validator, Rust's error handling, etc really take the pain out of the whole affair. That said I wouldn't recommend it until the ecosystem matures and stabilizes unless you really like updating lifetimes all over rocket libraries every few months.
azdle 5y ago
I've been "a rust dev" for 4 years, and I honestly can't see Rust not becoming a majorly used language. It's just so _nice_ to use. And I don't mean just "write" also mean "refactor" and "read" which honestly have been some of the hardest things to do in C (the last major language I, I dunno, specialized in(?)). Between the compiler pointing out when you're too sleep deprived to be writing what you're writing or the general "write what you mean, even if it takes a few more keystrokes and the compiler yelling at you a time or two" attitude that seems to pervade the rust community, it's just a nice language to continue to develop in. Which, again, this is maybe self-serving, but it really feels like a incredibly good long-term investment to learn. Even if you don't end up using it professionally (somehow) the compiler teaches you how to write better low level code.
bsder 5y ago
> I'm curious what people think about Rust as a long-term investment from an employment/job perspective. Is it going to pay the bills for the next 10 years? The answer is almost certainly: no. From a career standpoint, you would be better off learning C/C++ in much more detail before investing time in Rust. If you want the "canary in the coal mine", watch what the game developers use for the game engines (they mostly use C++ right now). When Rust starts becoming common among game developers, it's got enough momentum for a job ("career" is probably a bit much). However, even when Rust hits critical mass, it's unlikely to be a "career choice" programming language--you will have to know Rust AND <something else more important>. The world has changed, and "One Language To Rule Them All" is no longer a thing. C, Java, Python, C++, Javascript, C# are going to hold the top 5 of programming languages for the conceivable future. Not matter how good Rust is it is not going to displace C and C++ on any reasonable timescale--inertia is a thing. Swift and Visual Basic have their niche and nothing is going to blast them out of it. After that, it's pretty much a free-for-all in terms of language popularity, but everything is tiny at that point.
- pcwalton 5y ago
  > If you want the "canary in the coal mine", watch what the game developers use for the game engines (they mostly use C++ right now). When Rust starts becoming common among game developers, it's got enough momentum for a job ("career" is probably a bit much). I don't see why the entertainment industry would be any more important to pay attention to than any other tech-adjacent industry, such as finance, health care, transportation, etc. If anything, the short-term focus on the next title means that the games industry tends to be relatively late adopters of experimental core tech: witness how more quickly tech companies adopted C++11 as compared to game studios, for example. (This is not to criticize entertainment's conservatism with technology choices: it's a tough business and they are understandably risk-averse.)
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    game programming is performance heavy, while other tech-adjacent industry may be requirements-driven. Also, C++ has existed for what? 30 years? t
mhh__ 5y ago
With niche programming languages, I think the thing is to embrace the niche rather than try to go the traditional way. We could be an outlier, but if there are enough D jobs going around (Often very well compensated), you shouldn't have a problem with Rust.
keyle 5y ago
I don't personally write Rust for a living, but it's a chicken and egg problem. The industry wants to start using it but can't find dev with commercial x years experience to have the confidence to invest in it and the developers can't get professional experience because they can't find a job in rustland yet. This doesn't happen in PHP due to the age and spread of the language (for better or worse). So I think it's a timing issue. If the language is solid and solves a problem uniquely and is well received where it is used (and not just some freak example in a company somewhere with a blog post "we use this and it's the best!") - it will pierce through after X years.
bradleyjg 5y ago
It’s a big pivot from php in terms of the level of the stack it’s targeting. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but keep in mind that there’s a bunch of associated skills, knowledge, and even culture that differ in web dev vs. for example distributed systems.
jcrites 5y ago
I believe that Rust is positioned to be the Next Big Language for server-side and application programming, taking over for C/C++/Java. I'm not sure if there's a .NET-compatible implementation or interop but it'd likely take over C# as well if so, if Microsoft decides to invest in it. They have pretty good languages like F# already but Rust is designed around zero-cost abstractions and avoids the garbage collection penalty that comes with running on the JVM or .NET. Rust offers performance, type safety, memory safety, and metaprogramming that are provided by few other (largely academic) languages, while permitting multiple programming styles and escapes from those restrictions when you need them. On the other hand, I don't think the Web-oriented languages will go away unless someone develops a variant of Rust or Rust framework intended for building websites. However, for everything else that's not running inside a web page or supplying the content in a web server, I think we'll see a gradual transition to Rust; the web server will be in Rust; the JavaScript compiler will be in Rust; the browser will eventually be in Rust; and so on.
- hderms 5y ago
  I've been feeling this way as well. I think it all comes down to whether the ecosystem can be built up enough where your average developer can be productive without feeling like they're fighting the language or trying to figure out which smart pointer they need to use in which situation. Obviously those issues will still exist but could likely be mitigated if enough work is put into the ecosystem
- TwoBit 5y ago
  So what will be the security flaws we will see in Rust-based software in the future? Seems like there are still many kinds of flaws that no language can prevent.
- throwaway189262 5y ago
  It won't replace JVM/CLR. Rust community is pretty against GC and even though lifetimes are wayyyy better than C memory management they're not nearly as convenient as GC. If Rust ever gets a good GC it might very well replace VM languages. But even if they started now, it would take years. Rust also has long compile times. Java and C# projects, even huge ones, build in a couple seconds because compilation is done in JIT. Go is AOT but sacrifices some performance for fast compilation too. It's important for a general purpose language where performance is not #1 concern but maybe #2 or #3. Same story as GC. Sacrifice a small amount of performance for convenience. That's not what Rust is designed for. Rust is positioned as a systems language to replace C dialects and it that I think it will be wildly successful
atweiden 5y ago
I just got done cowboy coding 2500 lines of unchecked input validation code in Rust. While I didn’t particularly enjoy writing Rust — the syntax has taken some getting used to — I also don’t expect to enjoy writing anything in the domain of C or C++. What I did enjoy was correcting the hundreds of errors which had accumulated over the course of several days without checking the code at all, thanks in large part to rust-analyzer and VSCode. On the cmdline, rustc displays gorgeous error messages — easily the best compiler error messages I’ve seen from any programming language — and Cargo is a dependency manager and build tool without equal. The Rust ecosystem in general is already quite large. Although I’m a neophyte at coding Rust, I haven’t run into an error message yet that StackOverflow or Reddit didn’t end up resolving. On paper, Rust saves companies money by eliminating the memory safety bugs which would otherwise show up in C/C++ code. At the same time, Rust’s developer tooling ends up being so ergonomic to work with, and the language sufficiently expressive and flexible, that I can see Rust competing in areas beyond those reserved for C/C++. IMO Rust is basically OCaml for the 21st century. My bet is on Rust usurping C/C++, and I expect Rust’s rise will be nothing short of meteoric over the coming years. The involvement of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the Rust Foundation bodes particularly well for this, as do informal surveys of developers which consistently show tremendous grassroots enthusiasm for the language. Just my 2c: but bet on Rust, bet heavily on Rust, and bet on Rust immediately, without delay.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  It still misses the OCaml compile times, though.
izgzhen 5y ago
Yes and no. If Rust got a much larger adaption, then there will be many more people learning it then Rust skill is hardly a special thing. If not, a less-adapted language will never pay you with the top market rate since it is not used by most people. So what really matter is the size of total programmer market.
hu3 5y ago
If you get proficient in a technology, you'll be employable regardless of the market size or niche. There's always demand for specialists. On the other hand if you're more of a generalist, I'd say stay with popular technologies such as Python, JVM and .NET. You can't go wrong with any of these for the next 20 years. PHP has been making strides lately with JIT, Laravel and proposals for generics. So staying on it shouldn't prove a bad choice either. But if you're looking for greener pastures while maintaining great employability, my personal bet for the next decades is .NET/C#. And it tends to pay more than PHP on average.
sai_c 5y ago
Disclaimer: Embedded dev here, working with 8, 16 and 32 Bit microcontrollers. Almost exclusively C. In Europe (and especially in Germany where I live) I don't see myself writing Rust in my day job for years to come (already twenty years in). Not because it's technically impossible or Rust is inferior, but simply because it seems to take decades for european/german companies to accept or at least try new ways of doing things. Mind you, I'm not talking about startups (we don't have THAT many in Europe/Germany in the first place). Also, those are (mostly) web stuff companies. Warning, unpopular opinion following. I think HN is not the right place to ask this question. You will find a dev crowd here that is nothing like the big, quiet dev community out there in the real world. Most people here love trying new things (languages, frameworks, you name it I've tried it). So don't base your conclusions on those answers alone. Talk to regular devs (those who say "Hackers News? Never heard of it."). Because those people set what will be used in companies. EDIT: Corrected spelling of quiet.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- m463 5y ago
  > (those who say "Hackers News? Never heard of it.") "learn to administer microsoft tools, like active directory and exchange."
  - oblio 5y ago
    Or SAP and any other ERP, or Salesforce and any other CRM, or any other kind of enterprise or banking software (Java, .NET, C++), VBA and "small" internal applications. Probably 60-80%+ of the software developers and sysadmins out there :-)
- ngrilly 5y ago
  I'm leading the software team at Northvolt Systems AB. Half the team is composed of embedded software engineers. We are currently using C to develop our battery management system. But I definitely think Rust as a bright future for that kind of application. The reason why is because functional safety is a major concern in battery systems. And it's really hard to achieve this in C, for the same reasons it's hard to write secure C code. The main obstacle to Rust adoption in embedded systems with functional safety requirements is that the toolchain is not qualified according to the functional safety standards we have to follow. If we could have something like the Arm Compiler for Functional Safety, but for Rust, then I think we could start using it. I'd be really interested to investigate this, in collaboration with other teams sharing that interest. https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/embedded/arm-compiler/safety https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/embedded/arm-co...
pjmlp 5y ago
I think outside the domains of kernel and driver programming, eventually game development, it doesn't make much sense switching to Rust for userspace application development. That domain is already more than coverered with languages offering AOT/JIT compilers, managed memory (in whatever form), very nice tooling and ecosystems with libraries for about anything.
throwaway189262 5y ago
As someone that's forced to write C occasionally Rust is a godsend. I prefer high level languages but when I need the performance it's nice to have something that doesn't feel like it's from the 80's. C is extremely painful. C++ is a shitshow. Rust is glorious in comparison. Rust, or something like it, will definitely replace C/C++ someday. And rust has way more traction than anything else

est31 5y ago

From a long term perspective I'm not worried but short to mid term it might cause some issues because currently there aren't that many Rust jobs yet. It's kind of a niche still, jobs wise.

dragosmocrii 5y ago
Thank you, this is reassuring!

habitue 5y ago

Rust has been picked up at Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. I think that gravitational pull is going to keep Rust a going concern for a long time. That being said, it's an investment in the future mostly. There aren't anywhere near as many Rust jobs as PHP, Java, or Python jobs.

joatmon-snoo 5y ago
Rust at Google is in a bit of an awkward state. There's a bunch of teams/projects that have used it, but we haven't yet staffed a team to manage an internal Rust toolchain/ecosystem. The most recent one was Kotlin, in large part because our Android ecosystem was increasingly having to play catch up, so we'll see if/when a Rust team gets staffed.
pjmlp 5y ago
While it has been picked at Microsoft, its relevance on the Windows developer eco-system is quite tiny. It remains to be seen when it will even have a place on VS installer.
legerdemain 5y ago
Rust has been adopted by multiple teams at Palantir. The bootstrap launcher for Palantir's ancient government software was rewritten in Rust to avoid having to ship Java 6. And some small piece of the custom software that Palantir wrote for BP to manage oil wells was written in Rust, because the single dev on the project was also a maintainer of some Rust crates and could get away with it.

nicoburns 5y ago

As a long term investment, I think it'll be great. I expect it'll be another 5-10 years before it's as employable as C++, but it'll last at least another 20 beyond that.

oblio 5y ago
Once/if it reaches that point, and considering its main niche (systems software), it will outlive roaches.

fioawjpoifajio 5y ago

I've never thought of myself as a C++ dev (or a PHP dev, or Rust dev, or Haskell dev). I write computer programs. I don't "invest" in a language and only take jobs that use that language. Learning more languages is almost always good. Not because you're learning more languages, but because you're learning more modes of thinking which will apply to any future language you learn.

est31 5y ago
I agree but many job postings contain stuff like "3+ years of professional experience in language x".
- abzug 5y ago
  Yes but with time you gain experience in one or more languages and you can choose a job with the ones you like (or tolerate more). You don't need to pick or specialize one to apply for this kind of postings.
- azdle 5y ago
  Honestly as someone (on the team) hiring for a job where someone else wrote the job posting, ignore the number. Just read that as "do you think you enjoy maintaining a codebase written in X". Job postings are the fucking worst.
- void_mint 5y ago
  I've never actually found that to be enforced. None of my jobs have shared a tech stack, all of them have included such language. YMMV of course.
  - oblio 5y ago
    They don't enforce the number of years, but they could ask you quite deep questions about the language. Even if you're a senior Python/Javascript developer, with experience in C# in the past, etc., if they start grilling you about Ruby, you probably won't prove that you're as equally productive as a similarly smart dev that is an actual senior Ruby dev.

brundolf 5y ago

Probably depends on what you want to be doing Do you want to work in systems, embedded, etc? Rust is almost certainly (at least a large part of) the future Web servers (at the application level)/native apps/games? It's gotten some traction, but the jury is still out

arecurrence 5y ago
Rust is rather painful compared to alternative choices for web servers today. I’ve had to write 10x the code in some circumstances for the same result and I find it becomes hard to reason when you have several async types. However, it has attributes that match it extremely well with function as a service where memory usage, cold start times, consistent execution, and compute costs are major factors. It’s extremely well suited to that environment. I expect to see it thrive here once some aspects of rust settle down further.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Yeah, the web framework situation is also just fairly early right now. Rocket looks promising but it's not at 1.0 yet, and the current release still requires the nightly compiler. It does a whole lot to improve the ergonomics, but even then it's not as easy as Python or Go. So it depends on the usecase. The good news is that the microservices trend makes it easy to optimize the "hot services" with a different language than what you use to throw together all your normal services.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    I wouldn't call it as "easy" as Python or Go but I've been writing production services off the Rocket master branch (all async and compiles on stable rust but the API itself is rather unstable) for the last few months and it's been easily as productive as Django (sans ORM & django-admin integration). 80-90% of my logic is in request guard implementations and diesel types/helpers which get reused all over the place, making the controller logic trivially simple. Reimplementing most of the bells and whistles took less time than trying to decipher Django's magic anytime it goes wrong. Rocket's DI and middleware layer with serde, validator, Rust's error handling, etc really take the pain out of the whole affair. That said I wouldn't recommend it until the ecosystem matures and stabilizes unless you really like updating lifetimes all over rocket libraries every few months.

azdle 5y ago

I've been "a rust dev" for 4 years, and I honestly can't see Rust not becoming a majorly used language. It's just so _nice_ to use. And I don't mean just "write" also mean "refactor" and "read" which honestly have been some of the hardest things to do in C (the last major language I, I dunno, specialized in(?)). Between the compiler pointing out when you're too sleep deprived to be writing what you're writing or the general "write what you mean, even if it takes a few more keystrokes and the compiler yelling at you a time or two" attitude that seems to pervade the rust community, it's just a nice language to continue to develop in. Which, again, this is maybe self-serving, but it really feels like a incredibly good long-term investment to learn. Even if you don't end up using it professionally (somehow) the compiler teaches you how to write better low level code.

bsder 5y ago

> I'm curious what people think about Rust as a long-term investment from an employment/job perspective. Is it going to pay the bills for the next 10 years? The answer is almost certainly: no. From a career standpoint, you would be better off learning C/C++ in much more detail before investing time in Rust. If you want the "canary in the coal mine", watch what the game developers use for the game engines (they mostly use C++ right now). When Rust starts becoming common among game developers, it's got enough momentum for a job ("career" is probably a bit much). However, even when Rust hits critical mass, it's unlikely to be a "career choice" programming language--you will have to know Rust AND <something else more important>. The world has changed, and "One Language To Rule Them All" is no longer a thing. C, Java, Python, C++, Javascript, C# are going to hold the top 5 of programming languages for the conceivable future. Not matter how good Rust is it is not going to displace C and C++ on any reasonable timescale--inertia is a thing. Swift and Visual Basic have their niche and nothing is going to blast them out of it. After that, it's pretty much a free-for-all in terms of language popularity, but everything is tiny at that point.

pcwalton 5y ago
> If you want the "canary in the coal mine", watch what the game developers use for the game engines (they mostly use C++ right now). When Rust starts becoming common among game developers, it's got enough momentum for a job ("career" is probably a bit much). I don't see why the entertainment industry would be any more important to pay attention to than any other tech-adjacent industry, such as finance, health care, transportation, etc. If anything, the short-term focus on the next title means that the games industry tends to be relatively late adopters of experimental core tech: witness how more quickly tech companies adopted C++11 as compared to game studios, for example. (This is not to criticize entertainment's conservatism with technology choices: it's a tough business and they are understandably risk-averse.)
- mistrial9 5y ago
  game programming is performance heavy, while other tech-adjacent industry may be requirements-driven. Also, C++ has existed for what? 30 years? t

mhh__ 5y ago

With niche programming languages, I think the thing is to embrace the niche rather than try to go the traditional way. We could be an outlier, but if there are enough D jobs going around (Often very well compensated), you shouldn't have a problem with Rust.

keyle 5y ago

I don't personally write Rust for a living, but it's a chicken and egg problem. The industry wants to start using it but can't find dev with commercial x years experience to have the confidence to invest in it and the developers can't get professional experience because they can't find a job in rustland yet. This doesn't happen in PHP due to the age and spread of the language (for better or worse). So I think it's a timing issue. If the language is solid and solves a problem uniquely and is well received where it is used (and not just some freak example in a company somewhere with a blog post "we use this and it's the best!") - it will pierce through after X years.

bradleyjg 5y ago

It’s a big pivot from php in terms of the level of the stack it’s targeting. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but keep in mind that there’s a bunch of associated skills, knowledge, and even culture that differ in web dev vs. for example distributed systems.

jcrites 5y ago

I believe that Rust is positioned to be the Next Big Language for server-side and application programming, taking over for C/C++/Java. I'm not sure if there's a .NET-compatible implementation or interop but it'd likely take over C# as well if so, if Microsoft decides to invest in it. They have pretty good languages like F# already but Rust is designed around zero-cost abstractions and avoids the garbage collection penalty that comes with running on the JVM or .NET. Rust offers performance, type safety, memory safety, and metaprogramming that are provided by few other (largely academic) languages, while permitting multiple programming styles and escapes from those restrictions when you need them. On the other hand, I don't think the Web-oriented languages will go away unless someone develops a variant of Rust or Rust framework intended for building websites. However, for everything else that's not running inside a web page or supplying the content in a web server, I think we'll see a gradual transition to Rust; the web server will be in Rust; the JavaScript compiler will be in Rust; the browser will eventually be in Rust; and so on.

hderms 5y ago
I've been feeling this way as well. I think it all comes down to whether the ecosystem can be built up enough where your average developer can be productive without feeling like they're fighting the language or trying to figure out which smart pointer they need to use in which situation. Obviously those issues will still exist but could likely be mitigated if enough work is put into the ecosystem
TwoBit 5y ago
So what will be the security flaws we will see in Rust-based software in the future? Seems like there are still many kinds of flaws that no language can prevent.
throwaway189262 5y ago
It won't replace JVM/CLR. Rust community is pretty against GC and even though lifetimes are wayyyy better than C memory management they're not nearly as convenient as GC. If Rust ever gets a good GC it might very well replace VM languages. But even if they started now, it would take years. Rust also has long compile times. Java and C# projects, even huge ones, build in a couple seconds because compilation is done in JIT. Go is AOT but sacrifices some performance for fast compilation too. It's important for a general purpose language where performance is not #1 concern but maybe #2 or #3. Same story as GC. Sacrifice a small amount of performance for convenience. That's not what Rust is designed for. Rust is positioned as a systems language to replace C dialects and it that I think it will be wildly successful

atweiden 5y ago

I just got done cowboy coding 2500 lines of unchecked input validation code in Rust. While I didn’t particularly enjoy writing Rust — the syntax has taken some getting used to — I also don’t expect to enjoy writing anything in the domain of C or C++. What I did enjoy was correcting the hundreds of errors which had accumulated over the course of several days without checking the code at all, thanks in large part to rust-analyzer and VSCode. On the cmdline, rustc displays gorgeous error messages — easily the best compiler error messages I’ve seen from any programming language — and Cargo is a dependency manager and build tool without equal. The Rust ecosystem in general is already quite large. Although I’m a neophyte at coding Rust, I haven’t run into an error message yet that StackOverflow or Reddit didn’t end up resolving. On paper, Rust saves companies money by eliminating the memory safety bugs which would otherwise show up in C/C++ code. At the same time, Rust’s developer tooling ends up being so ergonomic to work with, and the language sufficiently expressive and flexible, that I can see Rust competing in areas beyond those reserved for C/C++. IMO Rust is basically OCaml for the 21st century. My bet is on Rust usurping C/C++, and I expect Rust’s rise will be nothing short of meteoric over the coming years. The involvement of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the Rust Foundation bodes particularly well for this, as do informal surveys of developers which consistently show tremendous grassroots enthusiasm for the language. Just my 2c: but bet on Rust, bet heavily on Rust, and bet on Rust immediately, without delay.

pjmlp 5y ago
It still misses the OCaml compile times, though.

izgzhen 5y ago

Yes and no. If Rust got a much larger adaption, then there will be many more people learning it then Rust skill is hardly a special thing. If not, a less-adapted language will never pay you with the top market rate since it is not used by most people. So what really matter is the size of total programmer market.

hu3 5y ago

If you get proficient in a technology, you'll be employable regardless of the market size or niche. There's always demand for specialists. On the other hand if you're more of a generalist, I'd say stay with popular technologies such as Python, JVM and .NET. You can't go wrong with any of these for the next 20 years. PHP has been making strides lately with JIT, Laravel and proposals for generics. So staying on it shouldn't prove a bad choice either. But if you're looking for greener pastures while maintaining great employability, my personal bet for the next decades is .NET/C#. And it tends to pay more than PHP on average.

sai_c 5y ago

Disclaimer: Embedded dev here, working with 8, 16 and 32 Bit microcontrollers. Almost exclusively C. In Europe (and especially in Germany where I live) I don't see myself writing Rust in my day job for years to come (already twenty years in). Not because it's technically impossible or Rust is inferior, but simply because it seems to take decades for european/german companies to accept or at least try new ways of doing things. Mind you, I'm not talking about startups (we don't have THAT many in Europe/Germany in the first place). Also, those are (mostly) web stuff companies. Warning, unpopular opinion following. I think HN is not the right place to ask this question. You will find a dev crowd here that is nothing like the big, quiet dev community out there in the real world. Most people here love trying new things (languages, frameworks, you name it I've tried it). So don't base your conclusions on those answers alone. Talk to regular devs (those who say "Hackers News? Never heard of it."). Because those people set what will be used in companies. EDIT: Corrected spelling of quiet.

deleted 5y ago
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m463 5y ago
> (those who say "Hackers News? Never heard of it.") "learn to administer microsoft tools, like active directory and exchange."
- oblio 5y ago
  Or SAP and any other ERP, or Salesforce and any other CRM, or any other kind of enterprise or banking software (Java, .NET, C++), VBA and "small" internal applications. Probably 60-80%+ of the software developers and sysadmins out there :-)
ngrilly 5y ago
I'm leading the software team at Northvolt Systems AB. Half the team is composed of embedded software engineers. We are currently using C to develop our battery management system. But I definitely think Rust as a bright future for that kind of application. The reason why is because functional safety is a major concern in battery systems. And it's really hard to achieve this in C, for the same reasons it's hard to write secure C code. The main obstacle to Rust adoption in embedded systems with functional safety requirements is that the toolchain is not qualified according to the functional safety standards we have to follow. If we could have something like the Arm Compiler for Functional Safety, but for Rust, then I think we could start using it. I'd be really interested to investigate this, in collaboration with other teams sharing that interest. https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/embedded/arm-compiler/safety https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/embedded/arm-co...

pjmlp 5y ago

I think outside the domains of kernel and driver programming, eventually game development, it doesn't make much sense switching to Rust for userspace application development. That domain is already more than coverered with languages offering AOT/JIT compilers, managed memory (in whatever form), very nice tooling and ecosystems with libraries for about anything.

throwaway189262 5y ago

As someone that's forced to write C occasionally Rust is a godsend. I prefer high level languages but when I need the performance it's nice to have something that doesn't feel like it's from the 80's. C is extremely painful. C++ is a shitshow. Rust is glorious in comparison. Rust, or something like it, will definitely replace C/C++ someday. And rust has way more traction than anything else