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Rust is too complex and clunky to ever gain widespread acceptance outside its niches. It's been a decade already, us recovering and current zealots we all need

Rust is too complex and clunky to ever gain widespread acceptance outside its niches. It's been a decade already, us recovering and current zealots we all need to wake up and smell the roses. For system programming, treating memory as a critical resource with strictly traced ownership is a good design. For the other 97% of programing, memory needs to be there when you need it, to be plentiful and to get out of your way and not be a source of runtime bugs or compiler friction. Slight inefficiency is acceptable.

guipsp 3y ago
A decade is nothing in the lifespan of a programming language
e12e 3y ago
> Slight inefficiency is acceptable. Sure - and in rust that probably means boxed types everywhere. Maybe the worst feature of Java was the easy access to bare types. For rust it might be a culture thing - but that might change.
pyrale 3y ago
What you're describing is not the successor of C, though. It's one of the many managed-memory languages.
vlovich123 3y ago
> Rust is too complex and clunky to ever gain widespread acceptance outside its niches. Rust is a systems programming language (it didn't start out that way but is where it pivoted to) so I think we agree on that niche. Most people don't work on problems that Rust would help with, but the places it's suited for is seeing more Rust adoption, not less and those niches are quite large. For example, Linux kernel, Android, Windows kernel, Chrome, etc etc. Basically any C/C++ codebase, if it really needs to be C/C++, will get migrated and there's a metric fuckton of such code. There's probably more JS, Java, Python, Ruby, etc but those programs don't need to be migrated to Rust unless they need more performance/multithreading and can benefit from Rust in that way. Rust not making sense for JS, Java, Python, Ruby, etc coders does not make it a failure or a valid claim that it doesn't have "widespread acceptance" - after all those other languages also don't see widespread acceptance outside their niches.
Yoric 3y ago
Well, as usual, use whatever language fits your needs best. But Rust's main benefit is not performance, it is safety. There are very few languages in the industry that I feel have my back when it comes to reliability and one of them is Rust.
- trealira 3y ago
  It's both. It's fast enough to provide an alternative to C and C++ purely due to its performance, even ignoring that it's more enjoyable to write Rust than C and C++, and ignoring that Rust code is reliable. That's why Discord switched from Go to Rust for performance reasons, and why there are Python developers that replaced C with Rust for high-performance Python extension modules.

guipsp 3y ago

A decade is nothing in the lifespan of a programming language

e12e 3y ago

> Slight inefficiency is acceptable. Sure - and in rust that probably means boxed types everywhere. Maybe the worst feature of Java was the easy access to bare types. For rust it might be a culture thing - but that might change.

pyrale 3y ago

What you're describing is not the successor of C, though. It's one of the many managed-memory languages.

vlovich123 3y ago

> Rust is too complex and clunky to ever gain widespread acceptance outside its niches. Rust is a systems programming language (it didn't start out that way but is where it pivoted to) so I think we agree on that niche. Most people don't work on problems that Rust would help with, but the places it's suited for is seeing more Rust adoption, not less and those niches are quite large. For example, Linux kernel, Android, Windows kernel, Chrome, etc etc. Basically any C/C++ codebase, if it really needs to be C/C++, will get migrated and there's a metric fuckton of such code. There's probably more JS, Java, Python, Ruby, etc but those programs don't need to be migrated to Rust unless they need more performance/multithreading and can benefit from Rust in that way. Rust not making sense for JS, Java, Python, Ruby, etc coders does not make it a failure or a valid claim that it doesn't have "widespread acceptance" - after all those other languages also don't see widespread acceptance outside their niches.

Yoric 3y ago

Well, as usual, use whatever language fits your needs best. But Rust's main benefit is not performance, it is safety. There are very few languages in the industry that I feel have my back when it comes to reliability and one of them is Rust.

trealira 3y ago
It's both. It's fast enough to provide an alternative to C and C++ purely due to its performance, even ignoring that it's more enjoyable to write Rust than C and C++, and ignoring that Rust code is reliable. That's why Discord switched from Go to Rust for performance reasons, and why there are Python developers that replaced C with Rust for high-performance Python extension modules.