It did the safety thing first, or at least much earlier.
> Rust wasn't part of an major tech player's pre-existing ecosystem,
Completely overlooking Mozilla’s backing early on is too extreme. Mozilla pumped a ton of money that got Rust off the ground. And of course even now the Rust Foundation isn’t poor or something.
Despite Google employing the Go people, not really part of their “ecosystem” for years either. They really hedged on that one. Go popularity mostly grew outside of Google for years
But yes both projects have/had plenty of money. This isn’t Nim or Lua or something.
> when I've seen an institution talk about adopting Rust, there's been a lot of focus on the safety afforded by the borrow checker.
So why did they just start caring about safety this recently?
> it's probably because that new idea in particular has a lot of merit.
The point is “safety” for a low level system language wasn’t a new idea at all, it was just that the world outside did not value/demand it.
> That's not "fetishization."
The fetishization I am referring to is focusing on the memory safety so far above the type system, tooling, open community building, and even the syntax. Conversely Rust can’t manage to have an ABI past extern “C”.
Never said technical specs are irrelevant, that’s a straw man.
And finally, again this all to say, I think its memory safety story is not what is going to determine its fate and destiny in the next decade. It needs to evolve, this is more about governance than about a particular feature.
That rust in Linux depends on unstable isn’t end of the world, it’s not something to be proud of either.
I think it’s naive to think things like Carbon don’t have some competitive effects either.
To touch back on “it's still a relatively young language.” Java, C#, Swift and Go were all well established in their niches younger than Rust. But, it really doesn’t matter one whit if Rust is 5 or 35. I’m more interested in the present trajectory and where and why Rust struggles or has struggled to make inroads, not everything is fair to chalk up to just age IMHO.
It did the safety thing first, or at least much earlier.
> Rust wasn't part of an major tech player's pre-existing ecosystem,
Completely overlooking Mozilla’s backing early on is too extreme. Mozilla pumped a ton of money that got Rust off the ground. And of course even now the Rust Foundation isn’t poor or something.
Despite Google employing the Go people, not really part of their “ecosystem” for years either. They really hedged on that one. Go popularity mostly grew outside of Google for years
But yes both projects have/had plenty of money. This isn’t Nim or Lua or something.
> when I've seen an institution talk about adopting Rust, there's been a lot of focus on the safety afforded by the borrow checker.
So why did they just start caring about safety this recently?
> it's probably because that new idea in particular has a lot of merit.
The point is “safety” for a low level system language wasn’t a new idea at all, it was just that the world outside did not value/demand it.
> That's not "fetishization."
The fetishization I am referring to is focusing on the memory safety so far above the type system, tooling, open community building, and even the syntax. Conversely Rust can’t manage to have an ABI past extern “C”. Never said technical specs are irrelevant, that’s a straw man.
And finally, again this all to say, I think its memory safety story is not what is going to determine its fate and destiny in the next decade. It needs to evolve, this is more about governance than about a particular feature. That rust in Linux depends on unstable isn’t end of the world, it’s not something to be proud of either.
I think it’s naive to think things like Carbon don’t have some competitive effects either.
To touch back on “it's still a relatively young language.” Java, C#, Swift and Go were all well established in their niches younger than Rust. But, it really doesn’t matter one whit if Rust is 5 or 35. I’m more interested in the present trajectory and where and why Rust struggles or has struggled to make inroads, not everything is fair to chalk up to just age IMHO.