Hacker News Reader

Comment by drpossum | Hacker News Reader

I use rust as a case study about what happens when don't manage a need for users because of indecision and inflexibility. I've generally been disappointed by the rust community because of inflexibility and the unfortunate infighting that spills out. Just harmful to success.

View on HN

Not managing needs for lots of users because of indecision and/or inflexibility, has always been par for the course in Golang, as they wouldn't and won't introduce greatly requested features without years of careful study and design. And none of that has resulted in an adoption problem (but it indeed did result in a lot of whining). Actually, despite this extremely slow pace to introduce popular features, Go seems to be in very good shape.

One big difference is Go is primarily driven by Google devs and all the heavy duty work once agreed upon is implemented to last details by Google team. Rust is driven by volunteers for most part, so any carefully deliberated and designed things won't amount to much if implementers are busy, uninterested or just want to work other fun stuff and leave some things halfway done.

Aren't the async situation in Rust is because the designer want Rust not to be opinionated and be flexible? i.e. you can choose not to have runtime in your app or using runtime that fit your particular needs.

What need does Rust not serve? You don't have to use async if you don't want to, and for most use cases Tokio suffices. The number of people who hit edge cases with using tokio with other libraries is small.

Is it harmful to success. It certainly seems like Rust has been wildly successful. Maybe the async fragmentation will change that but I don't see any evidence of that so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com