When you write "... the Rust project saw Rust as more than just the language. The community and the people mattered." I have to ask why anyone thinks this isn't true for ANY code/stack/dep out there?
When I evaluate a technology for its appropriateness I first look at who's using it: Literally "Who are these people and what are they working on with this stuff?" The answer to this question determines more than 80% of the decision on whether the thing is going to be my choice.
Rust seems to be being used most by people who are interested in blockchain and crypto. They tend to be of a near monolithic ideological caste, too, which has its own problems. Do I want to get into a situation where I might have my hat in my hand with these folks? Not really.
(also the rust compiler is so slow I cannot believe it)
It’s a general purpose programming language. I know people doing embedded bare metal development on ARM, people writing single page browser apps and others experimenting with replacing their C++ packet parser for VoIP telephony.
Probably related to the Reddit job ads when you read /r/rust.
That said, blockchain companies using Rust take security very seriously.
It also funds cryptographic research which has a huge need of memory safety, performance and the possibility to implement constant-time primitives.
I don't see why the community of a language that focuses on safety and speed is not excited by having the language being adopted by communities which absolutely cannot compromise on safety and speed (communities referring to both cryptography and blockchain communities as they are distinct).
Disclaimer: I work in blockchain, I implement cryptographic primitives. While I don't use Rust, I do read a lot of Rust code from other blockchain projects or from cryptographers from elliptic curve cryptography to hashing functions.
Oh, everyone likes cryptography and is reluctantly thankful that "blockchain" companies fund FOSS projects. But most people don't like "blockchain" because there's a lot of good reasons to dislike it.
My reasons can be summed up as: "public blockchain" aka cryptocurrency is toxic — it's horrendously inefficient in the name of achieving censorship resistance, so people are literally burning fucktons of energy to make perfect "crime currency" work. It has fueled the rise of ransomware (and extortion in general) and all kinds of scams. Meanwhile "private blockchain" is just like good old merkle tree/hash chain stuff, infused with hilarious/awful marketing fueled by cryptocurrency hype.
- I wouldn't conflate blockchain and cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are one (infamous) use-case of blockchain technology.
- I agree that cryptocurrency turf fights are toxic
- censorship resistance does not equate privacy. The main blockchains today are actually fully transparent. The perfect crim currency is cash which is almost untraceable.
- The energy burn is to achieve distributed consensus. I don't think there is any distributed consensus algorithms that is not a tremendous energy burn today be it physical voting (transports, broadcasts, special machines, security, ...) or CEOs and diplomats flying around the world.
- The energy burn is still concerning but Proof-of-Work is not the only way to solve the Byzantine General problem via economic incentives. You only need a "rare resource" that cannot be easily replicated to avoid sybil attacks (i.e. not an email address). That can be cryptocurrency (Proof-of-stake) or storage (Proof-of-spacetime)
- I don't think you realize the scale of drug trafficking and other unsavory endeavors that use cash.
- Mostly agreed on private blockchain but there are some industry-wide private blockchains that are starting to emerge (including UNICEF and FAO) with very interesting applications (identity of children refugees and managing food).
> Cryptocurrencies are one (infamous) use-case of blockchain technology
None of the "other use cases" have been interesting in any way.
> The main blockchains today are actually fully transparent
So what? If the exchange between the cryptocurrency and real cash is not compromised, the only traceable thing is that some address which you don't know anything about got paid from another address which you don't know anything about.
Again, real world ransomware mostly uses Bitcoin.
> I don't think there is any distributed consensus algorithms that is not a tremendous energy burn today
Anything that is not trustless, even physical voting, should be vastly more efficient.
> Proof-of-stake […] Proof-of-spacetime
Yeah, when did Ethereum promise a switch to proof-of-steak? Where is that again? Has anyone actually proven the security of any of these alternatives?
When I evaluate a technology for its appropriateness I first look at who's using it: Literally "Who are these people and what are they working on with this stuff?" The answer to this question determines more than 80% of the decision on whether the thing is going to be my choice.
Rust seems to be being used most by people who are interested in blockchain and crypto. They tend to be of a near monolithic ideological caste, too, which has its own problems. Do I want to get into a situation where I might have my hat in my hand with these folks? Not really.
(also the rust compiler is so slow I cannot believe it)