5 ms·

The whole "is Rust relevant" feels like that needs the Ousterhout "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept" graph[1] stapled to the same. I'm n

by gopalv 4y ago

The whole "is Rust relevant" feels like that needs the Ousterhout "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept" graph[1] stapled to the same. I'm not sure what the y-intercept of Rust is, but its slope seems to be pointed towards more code being written in it than ever before. For example, the wasm compilation is probably the clincher for my toy projects because I like to build stuff to run on a website, but I don't always like writing in JS. [1] - https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185

b112 4y ago
Rust is, but its slope seems to be pointed towards more code People playing with new stuff in a regular basis? HN Readers: all, RestOfWorld: None. People who have heard of rust? Similar to above. Rest of world=99.99% of devs. Yes I am exaggerating, but this place is a bubble. Rust does seem to be growing in popularity, but so far, doing so in a really tight community.
- bsder 4y ago
  Yes and no. Rust is being used where it makes sense--generally security. So, gamedev won't use it for main loops but will use it for networking code. The crypto Ponzi brigade chose Rust for a reason. Some of us who write communication stacks (TCP/IP, CANBUS, etc.) try to use Rust whenever possible. However, you are correct in that Rust popularity is growing, but it's going to be slow. If you look at the TIOBE index, there is a limit as to what Rust can really displace. A lot of the top languages are now GC-based, you're not going to reach for Rust if you can use those. So, Rust can realistically only displace C, C++, and ... nothing else. That means almost 75% of programming language use cases aren't even in scope. And C programmers really aren't going to gravitate to Rust as it's more of a C++ replacement. So, you need a specific usecase (security) or a greenfield project that would use C++. That's going to be a slow climb.
pjmlp 4y ago
You just have to look to domains where C++ rules to see that while the community is aware of Rust, hardly anything is happening in HPC, HFT, GPGPU, Khronos APIs, LLVM/GCC, MPI, OpenMP, AUTOSAR[0], Unreal/Unity/Godot, PlayStation, XBox, Switch, Apple and Windows official APIs,.... So while Rust is being adopted, it is at the same scale that C++ was against C around the early 1990's, in regards to market size adoption. [0] - They are looking into it, still no standard update that allows for Rust
- whyever 4y ago
  There is an official Rust Windows API: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    An official work in progress Windows binding, still far behind of what C# existing bindings are capable of, or legacy toolkits like MFC. Also given how the team has managed C++/CX transition to C++/WinRT with lesser tooling stuck on C++17, dropped Modern C++ bindings [0][1], before going into other shinny thing, I wonder how long they will keep at it. [0] - https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making-win32-apis-more-accessible-to-more-languages https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making... [1] - https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32 https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      It doesn't matter if the project is driven by Microsoft or not, the cat (of automatically generated language bindings) is out of the bag. E.g. Zig is using the same approach without being an official MS project: https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32 https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32, and Apple has an automatically generated C++ API for Metal (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/). In the future, the question won't be "what language do I need to learn to code on this platform", but instead "where are the language bindings for my favourite language".
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Depends if one is on yak shaving or delivering code into production. Being a Borland and ETHZ fanboy has taught me some hard lessons in development effort, when languages don't have tier 1 support from platform owners. So until Rust is on Visual Studio and Windows SDK out of the box, I rather keep using .NET languages alongside C++ for Windows development.
    - whizzter 4y ago

by gopalv 4y ago

b112 4y ago

Rust is, but its slope seems to be pointed towards more code People playing with new stuff in a regular basis? HN Readers: all, RestOfWorld: None. People who have heard of rust? Similar to above. Rest of world=99.99% of devs. Yes I am exaggerating, but this place is a bubble. Rust does seem to be growing in popularity, but so far, doing so in a really tight community.

bsder 4y ago
Yes and no. Rust is being used where it makes sense--generally security. So, gamedev won't use it for main loops but will use it for networking code. The crypto Ponzi brigade chose Rust for a reason. Some of us who write communication stacks (TCP/IP, CANBUS, etc.) try to use Rust whenever possible. However, you are correct in that Rust popularity is growing, but it's going to be slow. If you look at the TIOBE index, there is a limit as to what Rust can really displace. A lot of the top languages are now GC-based, you're not going to reach for Rust if you can use those. So, Rust can realistically only displace C, C++, and ... nothing else. That means almost 75% of programming language use cases aren't even in scope. And C programmers really aren't going to gravitate to Rust as it's more of a C++ replacement. So, you need a specific usecase (security) or a greenfield project that would use C++. That's going to be a slow climb.

pjmlp 4y ago

You just have to look to domains where C++ rules to see that while the community is aware of Rust, hardly anything is happening in HPC, HFT, GPGPU, Khronos APIs, LLVM/GCC, MPI, OpenMP, AUTOSAR[0], Unreal/Unity/Godot, PlayStation, XBox, Switch, Apple and Windows official APIs,.... So while Rust is being adopted, it is at the same scale that C++ was against C around the early 1990's, in regards to market size adoption. [0] - They are looking into it, still no standard update that allows for Rust

whyever 4y ago
There is an official Rust Windows API: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs
- pjmlp 4y ago
  An official work in progress Windows binding, still far behind of what C# existing bindings are capable of, or legacy toolkits like MFC. Also given how the team has managed C++/CX transition to C++/WinRT with lesser tooling stuck on C++17, dropped Modern C++ bindings [0][1], before going into other shinny thing, I wonder how long they will keep at it. [0] - https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making-win32-apis-more-accessible-to-more-languages https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making... [1] - https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32 https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    It doesn't matter if the project is driven by Microsoft or not, the cat (of automatically generated language bindings) is out of the bag. E.g. Zig is using the same approach without being an official MS project: https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32 https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32, and Apple has an automatically generated C++ API for Metal (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/). In the future, the question won't be "what language do I need to learn to code on this platform", but instead "where are the language bindings for my favourite language".
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Depends if one is on yak shaving or delivering code into production. Being a Borland and ETHZ fanboy has taught me some hard lessons in development effort, when languages don't have tier 1 support from platform owners. So until Rust is on Visual Studio and Windows SDK out of the box, I rather keep using .NET languages alongside C++ for Windows development.
  - whizzter 4y ago