Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

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Technical reasons alone don't clarify what's happening. Everyone's explaining basically why "Rust is awesome", which is not what was asked.

It's popular because Rust fans are heavily promoting it on HN as the solution to certain classes of programming errors. 2016 is probably going to be the year of Rust on HN, generally there's a new language every year such as Ruby, Javascript, etc. This year Go is a strong competitor and Elixir was looking strong but it fizzled out. :-)

It's controversial because users of other languages (understandably) don't want to rewrite their project, or they don't want to learn an entire new ecosystem that does exactly what the previous thing did, except in a safer way. Finally, some of them have enough experience to recognise that a new tool is never perfect, and we just haven't had enough time to figure out what the pitfalls and cons of Rust are.

The facts that Rust is quite young, has no shipping hero project as a case study and there are basically no jobs available are adding fuel to the fire.

Programmers are suckers for a good programming language story and love thinking that there's a language that is truly a joy to program in and will fulfill all their wishes. PL topics are always under heavy discussion.

> The facts that Rust is quite young, has no shipping hero project as a case study and there are basically no jobs available are adding fuel to the fire.

That's a bit of a misrepresentation though. Rust code is shipping in Firefox, and more importantly, Servo will have an alpha release in June.

The close integration between Rust and Servo development, as well as the rigorous pre 1.0 process also set it apart from other languages of comparable age.

I want to see a large-scale system written in Rust or a security-critical piece of infrastructure where it's demonstrable that defects were reduced. Of course, no one is obliged to fulfill my wish, it's just a criteria that I use to evaluate the maturity of a tool and that I think is very reasonable.

DropBox has a 60k line project http://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-amaz...

I think a browser is a large-scale, security critical piece of infrastructure.

Whether servo will truly have fewer leaks and security issues we'll have to see. They are also aiming for mor parallelism and therefore faster rendering....

> The facts that Rust is quite young, has no shipping hero project as a case study

Their Cargo package manager is written in Rust, and everyone seems to like it.

and compiler.

> The facts that Rust is quite young, has no shipping hero project as a case study

Dropbox using it sounds like a pretty good hero project...

Hard to say. I've seen posts by jamwt (I assume someone that's working on the said Rust project) which are more confusing than enlightening.

In one they say that Dropbox is investing multiple millions in a key piece of infrastructure written in Rust. One month later they say that the project is written in go with some Rust and it will "stay that way".

There was also a HN thread, maybe that contains more clues.

The fact that it was Go+Rust has never changed. Dropbox had a huge piece of infra being written in Go, they rewrote a core part of it in Rust and got massive savings from that. I presume a lot of that infra isn't bottlenecked by perf, so it doesn't make sense to rewrite it.

> In one they say that Dropbox is investing multiple millions in a key piece of infrastructure written in Rust. One month later they say that the project is written in go with some Rust and it will "stay that way".

Their overall infrastructure is in Go and they're fine with that, they've (re)written specific components in Rust for memory savings (and CPU though less so), they have ~60kLOC of rust in production according to jamwt comments on reddit.

I find your comment surprising, since Rust has been discussed on HN for over five years. It's been a popular topic for the past several. I also don't see much controversy, or "fire". It's interesting, so people are talking about it.

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