How often does an average X developer delve down to compiler details and contribute to static analysis tooling ?
Metaprogramming and compilers/language analysis tooling is a jump above your run of the mill frontend code or CRUD backends.
Sort of elitist, but IMO devs capable of tackling that complexity level won't be hindered by a different language much.
And Rust is really tame compared say C/C++. Borrow checker is a PITA, but it's also really good at providing guardrails in the manual memory management land, and the build tooling is really good. Don't know enough about Zig but I get the impression that rust guardrails would help developers without C/C++ background contribute safe code.
You could argue Go is an alternative for this use case (and similar languages) but it brings it's own runtime/GC, which complicates things significantly when you're dealing with multi language projects. There's real value in having simple C FFI and minimal dependencies.
> Sort of elitist, but IMO devs capable of tackling that complexity level won't be hindered by a different language much.
Not elitism, just an honest appraisal, though I think flawed as competency isn't linear it's heterogeneous - you'll find the most surprising limitations accompanying the most monumental talent. Language fixation is a common enough one, but even beyond that, the beginner-expert curve on each language shouldn't be underestimated regardless of talent or experience.
In particular when it comes to Javascript there's a tendency to believe the above by virtue of the community being very large & accessible - bringing in a lot of in-expert contributors, especially from the web design field. This isn't fully representative of the whole though: there are significant solid minorities of hard JS experts in most areas.
> How often does an average X developer delve down to compiler details and contribute to static analysis tooling?
I've done this a few times for Go. One of the nice things about Go is that this is actually pretty easy. I've written some pretty useful things with this and gotten good mileage out of it. Any competent Go programmer could do this in an afternoon.
I don't really know what the state of JS tooling on this is, but my impression is that it's a lot harder, partly because JS is just so much more complex of a language, even just on the syntax/AST level. And TypeScript is even more complex.
Metaprogramming and compilers/language analysis tooling is a jump above your run of the mill frontend code or CRUD backends.
Sort of elitist, but IMO devs capable of tackling that complexity level won't be hindered by a different language much.
And Rust is really tame compared say C/C++. Borrow checker is a PITA, but it's also really good at providing guardrails in the manual memory management land, and the build tooling is really good. Don't know enough about Zig but I get the impression that rust guardrails would help developers without C/C++ background contribute safe code.
You could argue Go is an alternative for this use case (and similar languages) but it brings it's own runtime/GC, which complicates things significantly when you're dealing with multi language projects. There's real value in having simple C FFI and minimal dependencies.