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Comment by Kukumber | Hacker News Reader

People are busy using Swift rather than trying to religiously advocate for Rust on various websites

One example:

Arc is a webkit powered browser written in swift and is crossplatform: https://twitter.com/hursh/status/1612472691747090432

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Don’t think it is yet, and it uses Chromium

No doubt people are busy using Swift, but Apple technology advocates are about as "religious advocates" as they come. And frankly, I'm not trying to say that as some kind of negative. It can be annoying, but clearly Apple users are genuine enthusiasts, even if I can't really see eye-to-eye with them. I do think that this genuine enthusiasm creates some distorted images of the reality of the world, though. The thing is, Apple users are likely so used to having more enthusiasm than competing communities of higher marketshare products and services that it's not surprising at all that the perception is that Rust is all hype. I'm more a Go coder than Rust by SLoC, and Rust has to be one of the most enthusiastically supported languages I've ever seen.

Still, it'd be silly to discredit Rust on the basis of its enthusiastic userbase: it's successful by any measure. It's invading the Linux kernel, the campuses of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, it's going to be in both Firefox and Chromium, and that's really just the beginning. Even if Swift had more collective SLoC than Rust, Rust is clearly on its way to solidifying its place as one of the most impactful programming languages of the past 20 years. That impact is even going to be felt in Swift: when talking about Swift, it is very common to advertise it in terms of Rust. I mean hell, that's basically what this blog post title does: "Look, Swift did something even Rust couldn't!" -- If Rust wasn't so influential, I do not think anyone would bother to compare the two in this way.

for 1 article like this, you get 1000000 ones from "rust evangelists from the Rust Evangelism Strike Force"

both can coexist, yet for the rust crowd only one must prevail

that's what's annoying about rust and its religious community

my previous comment's score is (-1), that speaks for itself don't you think ;)

All that says is that people decided to downvote the comment. I honestly think that's mainly because people feel it is an unfair or flippant characterization; obviously, plenty of people DO write Rust. Even despite the position Apple is able to hold Swift in with iOS, that has not stopped Rust from being similarly popular among professional developers; in Stack Overflow's last survey, double the professional respondents claimed to use Rust than Swift:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-t...

Even if you consider some of the respondents to be lying on purpose to skew the stats, I'm of a mind to believe that failing any real incentive, a majority of the correspondents are likely telling the truth. (The numbers don't show anything too wild, after all: JS on top, and C/C++ having a commanding lead on "modern" alternatives.)

Believe me though, some of my comments in this thread also got downvoted before recovering. The sad thing is, I don't really harbor any ill intent, I'm being blunt because I genuinely want things to be better; after all, if Swift is so good for developers, then I definitely would like to be able to consider it an option, especially considering that Rust is, frankly, a pain in the ass to code in sometimes. Today I do not, and what I need is a louder and clearer signal from Apple, not assurance from a community.

All in all, I am not really disagreeing that Rust has an extremely enthusiastic userbase. But what I am definitely disagreeing with is the idea that it's just hype. From my PoV, I 100% understand the value proposition of Rust. As an alternative to C and C++ it's extremely compelling, and in practice it's being integrated into large and complex applications like web browsers today in core components like the rendering engine, video codecs, etc.

As a closing note, to see why Rust and Swift are different ball games entirely, I feel you only need to ask just one simple question: "Why can't Swift serve the purpose Rust is serving in the Linux kernel, Firefox, Chromium, etc?"—each one has its own answers: insufficient control over memory allocations, interoperability issues, missing support for platforms or CPU architectures, lack of alternative toolchains (believe it or not, both Go and Rust have multiple complete toolchains; see gccgo, rust-gcc, mrustc, and even more if you count less complete implementations), and probably more things that I lack knowledge of. Finally, Rust just simply has more outreach: I can install it from my distribution's own packaging in virtually any Linux distro, it supports a lot of architectures and platforms even if they're not all tier-1, the rustup and cargo tools make it extremely fast and easy to get started, and more. Apple could totally close the gap here, but until they do, I don't feel like investing time into this language is a good idea for me personally. Like I said, I genuinely consider this to be a shame.

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