Fully agreed about Rust; getting rid of fundamental issues rather than perpetuating the cat-and-mouse problem of chasing classes of vulnerabilities, which sometimes are even intentional backdoors is fantastic. I hope we see more languages like Rust.
But every time I hear about it, people are disappointed by the language. So how is that going?
- For some reason, Rust posts constantly make the front page of HN. Either the Rust community includes a lot of HN users, or there are just a lot of people who like to hear about it.
- Rust is highly imperfect (as you would expect it to be). There's the constant breakage, which is supposed to end in like 2 or 3 months with 1.0; as a complex language it has more warts than, say, Go, and requires a deeper understanding to use well (i.e. you really benefit from experience with C++); the borrow checker takes some getting used to, I've heard, before you don't feel like you're fighting with it (haven't written enough code myself to get to that point); builds are slow; it doesn't have everyone's favorite pet feature; etc. Especially since people don't seem to feel the need to spend very much time getting to know Rust before writing blog posts and especially HN comments about it, that leads to a lot of complaints, which due to the previous point show up disproportionately on HN. (Actually, anecdotally I think most of the posts are positive, but every post about Rust is used to some extent as a "general Rust discussion" comment thread, just like every other topic. :)
- With all these complaints, the simple but critical point gets drowned out that the language works, pretty much - satisfies to a good extent if not perfectly its performance, safety, and readability goals. (For proof that it works in the large, consider that Servo is over 400k lines of Rust code and implements an already quite featureful HTML renderer[1].)
But I think there will be a good amount of positive hype once 1.0 gets out the door. Can't wait.
Who are you seeing that's disappointed? In my circles, people are so excited about Rust that they're practically frothing at the mouth for 1.0. I have one friend who spends all his free time contributing to Rust projects, and has half-jokingly considered quitting his job in order to spend even more time using the language. If anything, my problem is that I keep having to remind people to temper their expectations.
But every time I hear about it, people are disappointed by the language. So how is that going?