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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Rust is now common enough in the industry that everyone should be expected to at least read it, just like every programmer should be able to fizzbuzz in Python and JavaScript just as a matter of general technical literacy. There's no advanced Rust here and no concepts specific to the language.

It's a good article.

If Heinlein were in our industry, he might write this:

A programmer should be able to write a shell, parse binary data, design a protocol (and reverse engineer one too), authenticate a password, not fumble multi-code-point graphemes, wrangle semaphores, plug memory leaks, compress data, migrate databases, automate builds, git rebase a tree, profile tail latency, write a simple design doc for a complex system, draw a triangle, multiply tensors, and do fizzbuzz in every popular language on GitHub. Specialization is for insects.

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Here is a list of languages people can be generally expected to be able to read:

  * C
  * C++
  * Java
  * JavaScript
  * Python

It is the top 6 of the TIOBE index, minus C#:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Rust is not very high on the TIOBE index. It has rank 14 with a 1.29% rating. That is not much higher than COBOL.

Rust is where the action is though. It's not just about cumulative SLOC weight, but about mindshare among the "movers and shakers" of the industry. Think of it as a prestige language, an acrolect, you should at least vaguely know so that you can participate in the most challenging conversations in the field.

That is an interesting perspective. Here is my perspective. There are no popular projects that use Rust as a primary language. The current fashionable area of computers is machine learning. As far as high level languages go, you will see a mix of Python, C++ and perhaps a tiny bit of C there. Rust is nowhere to be seen.

Your description would be better applied to C, C++ and Python. That is what the majority of popular software uses and people having challenging conversations are often using one of those languages.

> There are no popular projects that use Rust as a primary language.

Servo is pretty notable and visible. ripgrep, influxdb, wasmer, deno. uv and ruff in the python ecosystem are written in rust.

AWS, Cloudflare, Discord (iirc), and Microsoft have all adopted Rust extensively.

As of late 2023 there are committed drivers in the Linux kernel written in rust. (Linux is pretty popular.) prior to those, only C and assembly were allowed.

None of this contradicts what I said.

Don't forget Pydantic

> There are no popular projects that use Rust as a primary language

You may be surprised to learn, Python's `cryptography` project is written (EDIT: maybe not primarily, it's hard to compare given dependencies) in Rust, and saw around 8.1 million downloads from PyPI yesterday. That puts it close to the top 20 (the 20th project comes in at 8.5m).

I would like to also point out that rust is boring as hell. Lots of otherwise ordinary people write super simple non-fancy programs using it too :)

You forgot the part where no one cares about TIOBE though.

As the TIOBE index says “The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors”. Very many people do care about that. Is there any reason I should think your remark is from some legitimate issue rather than you not liking the index results?

I would argue most people working software jobs either haven't heard of TIOBE or don't care about it. I only occasionally hear about it from strange internet comments that are far too focused on language particulars.

That is surprising. I heard about the TIOBE index often about 15 years ago, but now that I think about it, I have not heard about it lately. I wonder if the rise of Python and ML has caused people to stop asking “what language should I learn”. That is the question the TIOBE index often was cited to answer.

As an aside: why is Java winning out over C# these days? When I first experienced C# I didn't want to go back.

If you know C/C++ you could have learned to read Rust in the time you spent commenting in this thread. The number of new syntaxes you need to learn is quite minimal.

>Rust is now common enough in the industry

Source?

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