Desktop GUI. That will come from the community too. Nowadays 90% of GUI are web or mobile. Desktop GUI is now a niche with plenty of solutions.
Again, that “desktop is dead” song from Medium bloggers. Yes, GUI libraries should come from community, not creators of language, but language for doing mobile GUIs are mostly defined by Apple and Google. Almost all of these 90% of world’s GUIs are made by them too + Facebook + Uber + Amazon. Web GUI is DOM+js, also no place for Rust.
a niche with plenty of solutions
Mostly C/C++. Rust might be very useful here. Much more useful than replacement for Ruby and Python for web backends (see “No good Database Abstraction Layer”).
BTW, web apps like those written in Ruby and Python are niche too, because 90% of websites are made on CMSes like Wordpress and Drupal.
Well, this is just some random suggestions from someone who has been vaguely following rust for 2 years but hasn’t used it for anything nontrivial, so I wouldn’t read too much into it. Honestly not sure why it’s on the front page.
To have the language more widely used it’s important to reach out to people who don’t use it. The Rust community tries to make opinions of those folks heard too (e.g. with the survey). People can have valuable opinions even coming from a totally different background.
I don’t get the obsession with writing a big web framework for rust - there is a clear use case for when rust is the best choice, and I would say the critical problem for most new websites is finding a market and not safe + high performance which is what rust addresses.
My painfully earned opinion is to stick with python/rails/node if you care about delivering a dynamic website quickly. Sure, use rust for the supporting services where it might matter more but don’t kneecap yourself by writing the boring parts in rust for no gain, but real cost.
I don’t understand what the author’s problem with Haskell is, I bet Haskell is more widely used in the industry compared to Rust (I for one am working in a Haskell-first shop). Haskell has recently also gained an impressive momentum to the point that we have a shortage of Haskell talent (despite the influx of new folks) and not Haskell jobs, which was quite the opposite just a couple of years ago.
Your anecdotal experience is directly countered by mine. It is nearly impossible for me to find work doing Haskell.
Comparing Haskell to Rust industry usage is comparing items in the bottom % of languages. The relative numbers may be impressive but it says nothing about the likelihood of adoption.
My point is, “why use Haskell as a negative example?”. Haskell is a language that rose to its position purely based on its own merits and not a multi million dollar marketing budget backed by a mega corporation, nor its similarity to a popular language. And it’s also a fairly good position. So I don’t get the author’s point.
BTW, since it’s relevant to the discussion, I’ll use this opportunity to plug this here… we’re hiring :) https://www.picussecurity.com/careers/backend-developer.html Remote is OK, but we’re a fast growing Turkish company so we can currently probably offer, say, southern-europe kind of a salary. But that’ll probably change soon.
Big companies adoption determine the success of the language
This should be treated as a blocker-level culture bug, but the current level of intellectual deference to megacorporations by most programmers prevents this from happening.
We are producing a generation of the mass mind…Especially in this country many people are impressed by nothing that is not big: big cities, big churches, big corporations. We all are tempted to worship size. We live in an age of “Jumboism” whose men find security in that which is large in number and extensive in size. Men are afraid to stand alone for their convictions. There are those who have high and noble ideals, but they never reveal them because they are afraid of being non-conformist.” - Martin Luther King
Unfortunately, a lot of independently funded projects just don’t cut it anymore. Look at Gnome. When you look at things like the Linux Kernel, it’s funded by IBM, Intel, Redhat and others. They have dedicated full time people who are paid to contribute. I wrote a little about this a while back:
Again, that “desktop is dead” song from Medium bloggers. Yes, GUI libraries should come from community, not creators of language, but language for doing mobile GUIs are mostly defined by Apple and Google. Almost all of these 90% of world’s GUIs are made by them too + Facebook + Uber + Amazon. Web GUI is DOM+js, also no place for Rust.
Mostly C/C++. Rust might be very useful here. Much more useful than replacement for Ruby and Python for web backends (see “No good Database Abstraction Layer”).
BTW, web apps like those written in Ruby and Python are niche too, because 90% of websites are made on CMSes like Wordpress and Drupal.
Well, this is just some random suggestions from someone who has been vaguely following rust for 2 years but hasn’t used it for anything nontrivial, so I wouldn’t read too much into it. Honestly not sure why it’s on the front page.
To have the language more widely used it’s important to reach out to people who don’t use it. The Rust community tries to make opinions of those folks heard too (e.g. with the survey). People can have valuable opinions even coming from a totally different background.
Sure, but technomancy talks about lobste.rs :).
Speaking from a Rust community perspective, this is a very worthwhile post.
I’m a bit surprised that it’s exactly this one. FWIW, we’re currently got a call for community blogposts up, this one is part of it:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/01/03/new-years-rust-a-call-for-community-blogposts.html
I don’t get the obsession with writing a big web framework for rust - there is a clear use case for when rust is the best choice, and I would say the critical problem for most new websites is finding a market and not safe + high performance which is what rust addresses.
My painfully earned opinion is to stick with python/rails/node if you care about delivering a dynamic website quickly. Sure, use rust for the supporting services where it might matter more but don’t kneecap yourself by writing the boring parts in rust for no gain, but real cost.
Indeed. It would be as important for adoption as a web framework was for C or C++.
I don’t understand what the author’s problem with Haskell is, I bet Haskell is more widely used in the industry compared to Rust (I for one am working in a Haskell-first shop). Haskell has recently also gained an impressive momentum to the point that we have a shortage of Haskell talent (despite the influx of new folks) and not Haskell jobs, which was quite the opposite just a couple of years ago.
Your anecdotal experience is directly countered by mine. It is nearly impossible for me to find work doing Haskell.
Comparing Haskell to Rust industry usage is comparing items in the bottom % of languages. The relative numbers may be impressive but it says nothing about the likelihood of adoption.
My point is, “why use Haskell as a negative example?”. Haskell is a language that rose to its position purely based on its own merits and not a multi million dollar marketing budget backed by a mega corporation, nor its similarity to a popular language. And it’s also a fairly good position. So I don’t get the author’s point.
Regardless of popularity contest/whatever else, I do agree that I find these kinds of comparisons to be in bad taste.
Rust would be lucky to become Haskell. It should be aspired to.
BTW, since it’s relevant to the discussion, I’ll use this opportunity to plug this here… we’re hiring :) https://www.picussecurity.com/careers/backend-developer.html Remote is OK, but we’re a fast growing Turkish company so we can currently probably offer, say, southern-europe kind of a salary. But that’ll probably change soon.
This should be treated as a blocker-level culture bug, but the current level of intellectual deference to megacorporations by most programmers prevents this from happening.
Unfortunately, a lot of independently funded projects just don’t cut it anymore. Look at Gnome. When you look at things like the Linux Kernel, it’s funded by IBM, Intel, Redhat and others. They have dedicated full time people who are paid to contribute. I wrote a little about this a while back:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/
I really need to finish up my follow up on “Who Funds Opensource”