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Comment by thrwawyg6fdsa | Hacker News Reader

Every day there seems to be 2 or 3 posts about Rust in HN. I really don't get it.

Looking at job posts the language has minimal traction so why all this fuzz? Are there really that many people willing to throw in their time and energy to a tech stack that won't pay the bills? Or is it just a critical mass of fans creating all that fuzz? I don't get it but it really tires me out and I believe I'm not alone in it.

Anyway. To the point. Rust biggest challenge IMHO is job market. Untill it justifies the time investment for the millions of us that need to pay the bills it simply is not worth the effort. Being a dificult language to work with (as in at the other end of niceness like say Ruby) it is not even justifyable as a hobby lang.

I guess atm it's more of virtue signalling really. I write rust therefore i must be a good dev. Yeah. So are the haskell guy next door.

Anyway. Just my 2 cents.

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> Being a dificult language to work with (as in at the other end of niceness like say Ruby) it is not even justifyable as a hobby lang.

Obviously, there's a growing number of people who use Rust professionally, but that's not even the point to argue. Why would people need to "justify" their hobbies? Of course, it's perfectly fine if you don't care about the craft beyond "pay[ing] the bills". But others might, especially on a site called "Hacker News". Maybe let them discuss stuff they find personally interesting, whether those interests are "justified" according to your opinion or not.

The point of a language isn't to provide lots of jobs, but to be a tool that solves business problems, and Rust excels in a niche where there are no other serious players, writing safe and performant code. It has plenty of traction in that niche, look at AWS Firecracker or Cloudflare's Pingora that was unveiled just this week.

There may not be a ton of jobs compared to making web sites. But that's a totally different world from where Rust is strong. Deep in the stack, Rust is a pretty big player already and will be even more important in the future. People working down there would profit from learning Rust, not just to be attractive for new jobs, but because they will most likely find uses for it in their current job.

I've spent much of my career writing C++, which I consider an even more difficult language to work with than Rust. But even so, it gets used a lot for problems where performance or a low memory footprint are more important than developer productivity or memory safety.

Rust excites me because programs written in it can have similar memory safety to GC'd languages, but have similar runtime characteristics to C++ programs. I can use it to solve the same problems I previously needed C++ to solve, and also new problems where bullet-proof memory safety is a requirement.

I've been a quiet cheerleader for the language for the past 10 years because it's been the only language with community momentum that fits the niche that I care about. But I won't be hurt if some other language with similar runtime and safety characteristics to Rust replaces C++; I'll consider that a win.

The dynamo of the Rust marketing machine is as much a mystery to me as it is to you, but while I might gripe a bit on the way (and I do), it's pretty clear at this point that you'd better know it well if you want to be conversant in the randomly sampled piece of code 3-5 years from now.

I bitch about it because it's fucking annoying, but that didn't stop me from learning it well. My principles come above being a sycophant, but not above knowing the compiler stack on the language I'll be mostly writing in 3-5 years.

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