Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

A programming language should not be so hard it takes multiple attempts.

Rust is ultimately doomed to stay small for this reason.

In programming, anything that can be done more simply WILL be done more simply by some competitor. This will be the fate of Rust.

View on HN

And yet Rust was the fastest growing language on GitHub last year according to the 2023 review.

Ideally it would be easy to learn a language… but the claim that it’s ‘doomed’ if not does not appear to align with data.

https://github.blog/2023-11-08-the-state-of-open-source-and-...

It's easy to grow a small adoption in terms of percentage.

I grew my boiled eggs consumption by 100% yesterday.

Java/C#/C++ could never grow 40% in a year even if their absolute growth surpassed Rust by a wide margin.

There is necessary complexity in the domain rust is trying to cater to and rust is the simpler way to approach those problems compared to its competitors. Just because you don't work in those domains doesn't mean they don't exists.

Rust is just enforcing at compile time what you had to keep track in your mind with C/C++

Not really, no. If it was that, it would be another C++ compiler for a subset of C++, not an entirely new language with a new ecosystem, new community, and plenty of new issues and growing pains.

There are real reasons to use Rust, but there are also real pain points and issues with trying to reinvent everything from scratch.

I've had two serious attempts at learning Rust. Amusingly, I also chose a ray tracer for my last attempt. I was pretty happy with the resulting code but attempting a moderate refactor made me toss the whole project - I felt like I was fighting the language too much. Not sure if I'll try again

Reply on news.ycombinator.com