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> Rust has obviously way less than 1% market share but it's still extremely successful in the niche it's targeting

Extremely successful? It's not even mediocre. A more realistic description of its current position in its niche domain might be "still hanging in there", "not yet completely written off" or "not out of the race but waiting for a miracle."

Rust is barely at 5% of the low-level market. Its performance in its target domain is so abysmal at over seven years old that some who'd want to try it don't because its future looks so uncertain. For comparison, almost every programming language reached or at least neared its all-time peak popularity around age 10. Even if things improve we're looking at a peak of 20% of its target niche before the novelty wears off and other languages join the fray. It needs to double its market share in the next couple of years not to be "extremely successful" but just to stay relevant.

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Geez, this thread man.

@pron I was with you before: I think pcwaltons' take on zig is ... Err, unduly negative to the point of rudeness and closed minded — and kinda paints a clear picture for why we're seeing all of the defensiveness in twitter from andrewkelly and the zig folks.

But — I think you're coming into it similarly here against Rust. Unnecessarily rude, antagonistic, and on technical points: closed minded.

@pcwalton The zig team feels they've made good pragmatic choices around memory safety? Cool. Leave a few reasons why it's different from/and why rust took another approach and your take. Dope.

@pron The Rust folk are happy and proud of the inroads they've made in adoption. Dope. Sure, there's different ways to slice the numbers and you feel what? They've taken unearned pride in their work?

I'm a fan of all of your work, but man. This thread has been disheartening.

> you feel what? They've taken unearned pride in their work?

Not at all. I think Rust is a groundbreaking and influential language. Regardless of its success in market, it is a great and lasting contribution to programming language design.

I am, however, triggered by misleading claims about software correctness -- a subject I care deeply about -- which recently tend to come from the Rust community (replacing Haskell), and then annoyed further by claims of inevitability that I find hard to reconcile with the data. Sorry, but I am human :)

The Rust team is rightfully proud of their achievements, in language design, documentation, and also in offering those of us who are interested in software correctness another novel approach to consider.

> almost every programming language reached or at least neared its all-time peak popularity around age 10

This is an extremely vague claim with so many caveats that it doesn't end up meaning anything yet if you state it confidently you might fool idiots into thinking you said something consequential.

It'd be great if there was all the real competition you seem imagine for Rust, but we don't see that. What we see are people pretending that it doesn't matter if they produce crap software using unsafe languages, but their customers are starting to notice.

I don't think there are many caveats at all, and only a single obvious counterexample (Python).

As to "crap software", most of application software these days -- crappy or excellent -- is written in safe languages, and nearly all low-level code is written in unsafe languages, including some of the world's most dependable software, from avionics to OSes. We can say with close to certainty that we can do better than C, but we can also say that full soundness (Idris) is not the answer, so the sweet spot is obviously somewhere in the middle. But we really don't know where exactly -- except that it's not at either end -- or even how wide the sweet spot is (or maybe there are multiple ones, which could be either universally equivalent or dependent on some variables).

There's more we don't know about software correctness than what we know -- it's extremely complicated and affected by factors ranging from formal languages and complexity theory to management, economics, psychology, and social psychology -- but we believe noe that the ideas of the 1970s of full soundness being the only path have proven wrong (including an acknowledgment even by Tony Hoare [1]), and, indeed, Rust doesn't adopt soundness fully, and relies on testing, code reviews and other unsound processes as the main means for correctness, like virtually all mainstream programming languages.

Anyone who cares about correctness (like me -- https://pron.github.io) knows to be very skeptical of any claims for absolute answers, let alone simple ones, on that extremely complex subject.

[1]: http://176.9.41.242/docs/math/1996-hoare.pdf

I hope you get the help you need and deserve.

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