> "Safety in the systems space is Rust's raison d'être."
I think this quote points to the REAL underlying issue here.
Rust is a language primarily built for systems programming. It has many strengths to celebrate, and brings curated best practices as well as its own novel features to systems programming.
However, most programmers in 2016 aren't "systems programmers" anymore. At the very least, most programmers who actively talk-up new technologies on web forums are not systems programmers. The majority (or at least the majority of the vocal and socially engaged) are web developers, mobile developers, CRUD apps and microservices, etc.
As interesting as Rust may be in the systems space, it doesn't bring much compelling new hype to the table for web stuff.
You have yet-another-concurrency-approach? That's great, but most web developers rely on an app server or low-level library for that, and seldom have to think about concurrency up at the level of their own code.
You have an approach for memory safety without a garbage collector? That's great, but most web developers have never even had to think much about garbage collection. Java, Go, etc... the garbage collection performance of all these languages is on a level that makes this a moot point 99.999% of the time.
You have a seamless FFI for integrating with C code? That's great, but after 20 years of web development I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a project do this. And those examples were Perl-based CGI apps way back in the day.
Rust people seem almost dumbfounded that everyone hasn't jumped all over their language yet. And from a systems programmer perspective, memory safety without garbage collection does sound amazing. But you guys really need to understand that Hacker News and Reddit hype is driven by web developers, and that community isn't even sure whether or not type safety is a worthwhile feature! So really, it's amazing that you've managed to draw as much hype as you have. It's not about the mainstream popularity of your language, it's about the mainstream popularity of your field.
(1) Web apps are increasingly being split into a separation between presentation-only frontends + multiple "purely API-oriented" backends;
(2) There is a trend towards static typing in webapps.
We're currently using Go (plus some legacy Ruby apps we haven't rewritten yet) to implement microservice backends that serve APIs, and the frontend is all client-side JavaScript using React. (We also use Node.js to do server-side rendering of static HTML for Googlebot, but for a typical visitor, all the magic happens in the browser.)
For us, Go works well, and the compilation and static typing is a much-appreciated safety net compared to the everything-goes world of Ruby, not to mention much better performance and memory usage (one app is went from being multiple Unicorn processes consuming 2GB RAM in total, down to a single process using ~60MB and a fraction of the CPU usage).
But this isn't "systems programming" at all, and yet for me, Rust is very much on the table as a possible next language. I'm not sure if its complexity is large enough of a hindrance yet. Go is already a challenge for junior programmers who are used to dynamically typed languages, Rust much more so. I'd love to be able hire all seniors, but all the hot startups are taking them. (Though in that sense, Rust may even serve as a good carrot.)
As for static typing on the web side, TypeScript — which is essentially static typing for JS — is also most definitively in our future. The last year or so, Microsoft has made it easier to work with a mix of legacy JS and TS, so you no longer have to convert the entire codebase to migrate, which is great.
I don't think every company is going to move away from their classical Rails or PHP stack, of course, but there's definitely a trend, and I can imagine Rust becoming a popular alternative to the other statically-typed languages, including Scala and Java.
I've written web services in Rust, and I'm quite happy with it. Iron is a pleasure to use, and the stuff I write is incredibly performant. There's also something amazing about compiling a project to a single binary and deploying.
Rust is only about a year old. Once the library support grows, it's going to be a giant in just about every space I can think of.
I think this quote points to the REAL underlying issue here.
Rust is a language primarily built for systems programming. It has many strengths to celebrate, and brings curated best practices as well as its own novel features to systems programming.
However, most programmers in 2016 aren't "systems programmers" anymore. At the very least, most programmers who actively talk-up new technologies on web forums are not systems programmers. The majority (or at least the majority of the vocal and socially engaged) are web developers, mobile developers, CRUD apps and microservices, etc.
As interesting as Rust may be in the systems space, it doesn't bring much compelling new hype to the table for web stuff.
You have yet-another-concurrency-approach? That's great, but most web developers rely on an app server or low-level library for that, and seldom have to think about concurrency up at the level of their own code.
You have an approach for memory safety without a garbage collector? That's great, but most web developers have never even had to think much about garbage collection. Java, Go, etc... the garbage collection performance of all these languages is on a level that makes this a moot point 99.999% of the time.
You have a seamless FFI for integrating with C code? That's great, but after 20 years of web development I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a project do this. And those examples were Perl-based CGI apps way back in the day.
Rust people seem almost dumbfounded that everyone hasn't jumped all over their language yet. And from a systems programmer perspective, memory safety without garbage collection does sound amazing. But you guys really need to understand that Hacker News and Reddit hype is driven by web developers, and that community isn't even sure whether or not type safety is a worthwhile feature! So really, it's amazing that you've managed to draw as much hype as you have. It's not about the mainstream popularity of your language, it's about the mainstream popularity of your field.