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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

Given that the project had exactly one commit in the past year, I'm afraid the question is answered...

(Which is too bad, the ideas behind the project seem sound.)

A totally unscientific observation:

Do Rust projects have a tenancy of becoming abandoned maybe due to the complexity of the language since it's hard to contribute? I've seen enough cases on this that prompted me to ask this.

You’ve seen enough cases of what? People saying that it’s too hard to contribute?

No, cool projects in Github that are written in Rust but abandoned after some time.

Can't this be explained simply by rust being a new and trendy language with a lot of young developers experimenting while they improve their skills?

There are tons of those in every language. You just see a lot them in Rust because people are excited to submit Rust projects to HN.

Seems that you’ve skipped a bunch of steps in order to come up with your pet theory, then.

1. Rust projects become abandoned (observed fact)

2. Language complexity (?)

3. Hard to contribute (?)

I guess that’s why you were kind of defensive when you brought it up.

No , not really a lot of the time people are trying to tackle problems that have taken years to solve in other languages which isn’t easy and is why you see stuff abandoned. This project is also pretty similar to https://github.com/antoyo/relm which is an active project.

Instead of language complexity I think it's a result of the specific positioning of the Rust language as a more safe successor to C/C++.

Rewrite-in-Rust is a thing. Not only for applications but also for foundational libraries (crypto, http, async, etc). The ecosystem is still young with lots of gaps and many devs are experimenting with new approaches to fill those gaps. More new projects -> more abandoned projects.

I think we're just early enough in the language that the established libraries and their mechanisms for ensuring continuity just aren't there in many areas.

Other languages had similar teething problems, just ask anyone with applications in Zope, WebPy, Pylons, Merb, JS frameworks not named React, EJB, MFC, etc.

"early enough in the language" is really worrying at this point. I was there, at Mozilla London office in 2015 15th of May when Rust 1.0 was launched. That was 7 years ago. If you look at the history of languages, 7 years is a point of maturity for those that took off. I really hope Rust doesn't flame out like Scala did.

What makes you think it will flame out?

Again though, EJB, AngularJS, Backbone, Pylons were all things in languages that were widely accepted at the times those frameworks were in vogue yet still ran out of steam. Yet Java, JavaScript and Python are still here

And C#, C++, C.

For comparison, Python 1.0 was released in 1994. 7 years later in 2001, Python 2.2 was released. I don't think many of today's popular Python packages date back that far.

> For comparison, Python 1.0 was released in 1994. 7 years later in 2001, Python 2.2 was released. I don't think many of today's popular Python packages date back that far.

Python is an outlier though; it was mostly ignored until very suddenly it took off starting around the time Jupyter released.

Most (including I) think it took off due to how easy and accessible it was back then, syntax-wise. You could pick it up and be slightly productive in a day, be extremely productive in a week and essentially master it in a month.

Go is following a similar trajectory: productive contributor in a week, master in a month.

Rust is in the opposite direction: too many people simply give up on it, those that persevere report months before any reasonable productivity.

Before it's adoption with the scientific community, Python still had a place as "Better perl for scripting" and "Dynamic language for webapps if you don't like Ruby". e.g. Reddit, YouTube and Eve Online are notable apps written in Python before scientific Python was a thing.

Reddit and Eve are interesting in being largely stuck with the now-dead platforms they built on too, in the form of web.py and Stackless Python. YouTube I presume the original Python application is gone in favour of a bunch of Go and Java microservices by now.

It's interesting as someone who was in the Python for web development camp as Python for scientific computing took off as the two camps were both oblivious to the existence of the other in many cases.

>"Dynamic language for webapps if you don't like Ruby"

Wasn't PHP the king of dynamic laguages for Web?

PHP was an earlier era, and certainly continued (to this day even) to be used, but I was thinking more of the Rails era than PHP's peak, which came earlier.

> PHP was an earlier era, and certainly continued (to this day even) to be used, but I was thinking more of the Rails era than PHP's peak, which came earlier.

I don't think Rails/Ruby was ever used more than PHP.

IIRC, PHP at its lowest popularity ever is still higher than Rails/Ruby at it's highest popularity ever.

The lowest I can recall PHP being at is +-6% (recently). The highest that Rails/Ruby ever got to was <3% (2004/2005/2006).

PHP is still used. I don't know if many new apps are written in PHP, or it is used to maintain the large pool of existing PHP apps, but according to Tiobe, Redmonk, PyPl PHP is still widely used.

This is some extreme revisionist history here. The scientific Python community and many of the libraries around it go back way before Reddit, YouTube, etc.

Some dates from Wikipedia:

Major scientific libraries:

- SciPy: "Around 2001"

- ipython: 2001

- Matplotlib: 2003

- NumPy: 2006

- Pandas: 2008

Major web libraries:

- Zope: 1999

- Twisted Web: 2002

- WSGI: 2003

- Django: 2005

- Pylons: 2005

Applications mentioned:

- Eve Online: 2003

- YouTube: 2005

- Reddit: 2005

I don't think this justifies the claim that the web python community was around at the same time as the scientific community while the two were relatively unaware of each of other as "revisionist". It just makes it look like you were in the camp that was aware of the scientific stack and not the web stack.

> web python community was around at the same time as the scientific community while the two were relatively unaware of each of other

I didn’t dispute this, please reread what I said again.

> It just makes it look like you were in the camp that was aware of the scientific stack and not the web stack.

No, actually I’m a web stack Python guy mainly, I just actually know my history.

IMO, we're very much past the point at which things have "settled down"... as long as you're not doing web dev or desktop UI dev in Rust. The former will continue to evolve about as fast as JS-land does because it's all web people who have no idea what a sustainable project is, and the latter will take a few more years because nobody has really solved it in any language. (Ask your favourite "cross-platform" desktop UI framework what their accessibility story is; there is one that gets close, it's Qt.)

But like, if you're trying to do something you'd otherwise do in C++? Audio/video processing, or something along those lines? Yeah, it's fine. The common libraries you choose today are likely to be maintained going into the future.

typo : tenancy -> tendency

In my personal experience, I make and abandon a ton of Rust projects because it's such a fun language, and I really enjoy starting new projects in it. I get an idea, get excited about how I can model the types and relationships in Rust, then throw together an early prototype, then drop it when I've had my fun and before it turns into a job.

Other languages don't have as fun a type system, so I feel bogged down and lose motivation before I even start writing code.

I don't know how many others this applies to, but I have a lot of abandoned Rust projects because if it wasn't in Rust, I never would have even started writing them down before abandoning them.

I don't think Rust projects get abandoned any more than projects in other languages. I think it's just that you see them more because people are excited about Rust so they share projects even if they're abandoned.

Depends on the use case. If it is a GUI library project then yes.

Quite the opposite in this case:

https://twitter.com/bodil/status/1520404060138094592

The author of this crate enjoys advanced type systems, and can't wait for Rust to add what you'd call "more complexity" in the form of higher-kinded types, generic associated types, and specialization (some of these features are available in an unfinished/experimental form in the nightly compiler, but may not become part of the language anytime soon, if ever).

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