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I think the jury's still out on whether Rust will make it long term. Even if all the technology checks out, the project can easily be mismanaged into the ground

by sgt 3y ago

I think the jury's still out on whether Rust will make it long term. Even if all the technology checks out, the project can easily be mismanaged into the ground. We've already seen hints of that. Outside of C/C++ and Rust (seeing that MicroPython is irrelevant, as per your comment), what other options will be viable going into the future?

bborud 3y ago
You are probably right about Rust: it has challenges that seems to make a lot of people want to keep it at arms length. Viability isn't just about technical fitness, but also about momentum, community size, pace and having sensible "taste makers" that teach the community good design and programming practices. At the moment I don't see any viable alternatives. Rust has a good sized community AND people have been working on embedded use of it for many years already. It took a lot of work to get there. For an alternative to be viable it would have to achieve at least what Rust has achieved so far. What will ultimately determine if Rust becomes the new go-to language for embedded programming is the community forming around embedded Rust projects. Ruby is a good example of the power of a community trying to solve a given problem. I think Ruby would not have made it if it were not for Rails. Ruby started out as an interesting language with an atrociously bad runtime and ratty standard library. Yet it Rails had a community that vastly outperformed the qualities of the language/runtime it was based on. Perhaps embedded programming is where Rust will ultimately make such a huge difference the application of Rust becomes greater than Rust itself. Perhaps a Rust based RTOS, and a sensible approach to how embedded software is structured, modularized, and designed may be the thing that becomes greater than the language itself?
brianhorakh 3y ago
Linux & Microsoft win 11 both support native drivers in rust. Rust is a great (possibly best) way to build wasm. Wasm is extremely powerful. Name one language to do both secure blockchain smart contracts, & device drivers, and embedded systems. And it can use pyo3/maturing to expose code to python. Many significant python libraries are rewriting into rust. Clang/llvm targets means that rust can go anywhere C or C++ can go, including very esoteric systems. I don't think the jury is out, it just doesn't have mainstream corporate penetration yet, it may never have that and that's fine. Rust community can/will write bindings to anything, there is no need for other options, people don't realise how powerful rusts polyglot approach is.
- sgt 3y ago
  Consider this - you may just have had the Rust kool-aid and you don't even realize certain fallacies. Also, you say wasm is extremely powerful - but is it as useful as it is powerful? Is it the future? I doubt that as well.

by sgt 3y ago

bborud 3y ago

You are probably right about Rust: it has challenges that seems to make a lot of people want to keep it at arms length. Viability isn't just about technical fitness, but also about momentum, community size, pace and having sensible "taste makers" that teach the community good design and programming practices. At the moment I don't see any viable alternatives. Rust has a good sized community AND people have been working on embedded use of it for many years already. It took a lot of work to get there. For an alternative to be viable it would have to achieve at least what Rust has achieved so far. What will ultimately determine if Rust becomes the new go-to language for embedded programming is the community forming around embedded Rust projects. Ruby is a good example of the power of a community trying to solve a given problem. I think Ruby would not have made it if it were not for Rails. Ruby started out as an interesting language with an atrociously bad runtime and ratty standard library. Yet it Rails had a community that vastly outperformed the qualities of the language/runtime it was based on. Perhaps embedded programming is where Rust will ultimately make such a huge difference the application of Rust becomes greater than Rust itself. Perhaps a Rust based RTOS, and a sensible approach to how embedded software is structured, modularized, and designed may be the thing that becomes greater than the language itself?

brianhorakh 3y ago

Linux & Microsoft win 11 both support native drivers in rust. Rust is a great (possibly best) way to build wasm. Wasm is extremely powerful. Name one language to do both secure blockchain smart contracts, & device drivers, and embedded systems. And it can use pyo3/maturing to expose code to python. Many significant python libraries are rewriting into rust. Clang/llvm targets means that rust can go anywhere C or C++ can go, including very esoteric systems. I don't think the jury is out, it just doesn't have mainstream corporate penetration yet, it may never have that and that's fine. Rust community can/will write bindings to anything, there is no need for other options, people don't realise how powerful rusts polyglot approach is.

sgt 3y ago
Consider this - you may just have had the Rust kool-aid and you don't even realize certain fallacies. Also, you say wasm is extremely powerful - but is it as useful as it is powerful? Is it the future? I doubt that as well.