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Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I entirely agree - as notacoward says I think we're approaching a renaissance in certain areas.

- Rust and Go are becoming extremely popular extremely quickly.

- I think/hope we may soon see some sort of battle between OS container tech (Docker/LXC/cgroups, FreeBSD Jails) vs unikernels (Mirage, OSv, Linux unikernels) on paravirtualised platforms (Xen) as the full-weight-VM-running-Debian model ages.

edit: Oooh look, an exciting relevant systems software paper! http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf

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> Rust and Go are becoming extremely popular extremely quickly.

Unfortunately, that's yet another SV bias. Rust has hardly any adoption, and Go has moderate adoption and is growing nicely, but nothing close to justifying "extremely".

To be fair, we in the rust community are telling people to wait for 1.0 unless they are okay with constantly updating their code as we clean up the language for our first release. It's fair though to speak about momentum. Comparing Go's contributor list (https://golang.org/CONTRIBUTORS) with ours (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/AUTHORS.txt) has us with about 100 more than Go. I'm not saying our community is better than Go's or anything, but I'm certainly impressed a new language has been able to gain so much interest so quickly. When I first started contributing a couple years ago, we had like 15 people in our irc channel. Now we got over 500.

Oh, I didn't mean to criticize either of those languages, just to point out that SV developers are a tiny, tiny minority among the software community, and their early adopter style is not shared by the industry at large. Switching programming languages carries immense costs (probably in the billions of dollars across the industry), and companies make it only when the benefits are dramatic and incontrovertible. Most companies wouldn't even consider switching a programming language more than once in a decade, and some would only consider such a switch every 15 years or so.

That makes a lot of sense to me; Rust is a much more ambitious and interesting - from a programming language point of view - project than Go. I think that it as a language would appeal much more to the prototypical "language geek" (or at least the impression that I have of such people, including myself).

That's not to slam Rust for being "over-complex"/"ivory tower", or slam Go for being "simplistic". But Rust tries to solve such a hard problem - be expressive without any unnecessary overhead, retain memory safety - that it seems to naturally lead to a design and language that appeals to people that are interested in programming languages "for their own sake". Meanwhile Go tries to be sufficiently expressive and then get out of your way to solve whatever problem in whatever domain that you're trying to solve.

It took python about 15 years before it took off in popularity.

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