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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Rust in 2021 is basically the functional programming language this commenter was predicting:

> I predict that functional programming will continue to gain ground as people discover the benefits of immutability and easy parallelismâ€”but the functional language will not be Haskell, nor Scala, nor Clojure. At a guess, people will use something with:

>Strong tooling and libraries

>An accessible type system

>Deterministic memory behaviour

>By-default strict evaluation

>Commercial backing

>Every mainstream functional language is lacking in at least one of these areas.

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Rust is basically C++++ so I doubt it's what that commenter had in mind

One of replies to the comment was that C++11 was what the commenter wanted, whereupon the commenter mentioned ways it did not meet the criteria.

If you follow the C++ development, you can see a huge effort to make it support more funcational paradigms (see for example the efforts for structural pattern matching). However, its backward compatibility requirements have limited it a lot. So even if Rust was C++++ without the backward compatibility baggage it could easily reach these ideals.

More like (C)++++ rather than (C++)++.

C++-C

To me that's C++ snobbery talking. Long compile times, confusing type system, RAII as guiding design light

Just admit that it's basically C++

Without a sequence point the result of that expression is undefined behaviour. Is that what you're trying to say about Rust?

Except that it’s not really “gaining ground”, all things considered Rust is not that popular.

It seems like its gotten some use lately. Isnt aws a big user of it now. Along with a handful of mid size tech companies?

To me 2021 feels like the year Rust went mainstream. There is use in major companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, lots of second tier tech companies like Cloudflare, System76, Dropbox are big on it, serious work in including it in the Linux kernel, I've gotten multiple job contacts based on my listed Rust experience (sadly all from the crypto startup market, not really interested in that industry), and there are so many smaller projects that HN commenters are getting frustrated by them. Really the one gap in saying Rust has "made it" is the lack of a really big open source project like Go has Docker/Kubernetes that people can point to and show "see, they used it and got big" (Firefox not counted, since it's only ~10% Rust and added it after they were big).

But more and more people are using things built in Rust. Which is what I'd call gaining ground. Was playing around in Deno. Yes it's JS, but it was built in Rust. In some respects, that's the true test of a low-level language. Things built in it. C isn't popular. But you'd never say it's not popular because it's what everything is built on.

A lot more people get a paycheck every month writing C than Rust. C is an incredibly relevant and popular language.

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