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0 pointsgeodel9y ago0 comments

It is not my intention to show Rust in bad light. I roughly mean to say both languages have put about 6-7 years of engineering effort by now but usage differs by an order of magnitude or so.

I agree that they had very different priorities in beginning and it changes with time. My goal was to merely point out core rust people in Mozilla and elsewhere now recognize that industry usage is an area of high importance in coming months/years in contrast to purely technical concerns of past.

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bluejekyll9y ago· 1 in thread

I think your not looking at this correctly. Swift also had a very fast pasted release cycle like Go.

Rust took a different path, the developers until the 1.0 release basically said; use at your own risk, we reserve the right to change anything and everything and break it all. This freed them of trying to keep the language backward compatible.

After the 1.0 release, there have been nearly no breaking changes introduced to the language, and they have signaled that they want to keep this stability going into the future. This is a big difference from Go which decided to go for an earlier public release, and now is much more constrained on how it can change (if they don't want to break all the stuff built on it out there).

So it's not fair to include the 6-7 year development cycle, as that could be more thought of as a research period, one that laid the groundwork for the safety in everything which is the basis for Rust now.

geodelOP9y ago

I said 6-7 years of engineering effort not development cycle which are often linear. I am not blaming for taking long to get things right. If authors think they need more time then of course they need more time. Right now they really want to have broader industry usage and this can't be any clearer when they say:

"Production use measures our design success; it's the ultimate reality check. Rust takes a unique stance on a number of tradeoffs, which we believe to position it well for writing fast and reliable software. The real test of those beliefs is people using Rust to build large, production systems, on which they're betting time and money."