Ask HN: Rust or Haskell which is(or will be) used more in industry

4 pointsthickice9y ago6 comments

I understand that these two languages have a completely different design philosophy and can't be compared apple to apple. But purely from an industry adoption point of view which one is more likely to be the winner ?

6 comments

6 comments · 5 top-level

taylodl9y ago· 1 in thread

Rust has two huge things going for it:

1. C-based lineage

2. Designed for industry use

Haskell has become the "nights and weekends" language. People are using it on pet projects outside of work and they're arguably becoming better programmers for having done so. Rust though is in the C family of languages, for which nearly every developer has familiarity, and was designed for larger project teams to collaborate and maintain large projects. Add in Rust's memory management strategy and it's not requiring a VM (unlike Java/C#) so it runs fast in a Docker container and you have a winner.

To me a more interesting question to ask, because the answer isn't nearly as clear-cut, is whether Rust or Go will be used more in industry?

qqwy9y ago

Go is a language that is built in a way that makes it impossible to write generic code. This has been done on purpose, to make sure that the language stays simple (['Less is exponentially more'](https://commandcenter.blogspot.nl/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...), so that it can be easily understood and used and maintained by large teams.

However, I personally am against the idea that it is a good idea to solve your problems by giving a restrictive tool to large groups of mediocre programmers. Rather, I like the smaller, smart teams approach, which is what both Rust and Haskell fit much better.

If by 'used more' you mean that more people will use it, then Go will undoubtedly win because it has a much lower learning curve because there is just not a lot to learn. However, I do not think that Go will allow as innovative solutions to be created as Rust or Haskell do.

AnimalMuppet9y ago

Oh, look there, my crystal ball's on the blink again...

My guess: Rust.

Why you should believe my guess: Rust seems to be growing faster than Haskell.

Why you should not believe my guess: I'm primarily in the embedded space, where Rust fits well with the problems I'm used to having to solve. Haskell? Not so much. This makes Rust appear much more generally useful to me, when it may only be more useful in my specific area.

just-for-fun9y ago

I think that no one of them. They both are too complicated for average developers.

SamReidHughes9y ago

That's hard to say. The biggest risk for Rust is that it'll get beaten by something better. The biggest for Haskell is that nobody wants to use it because lazy evaluation is bad.

psyc9y ago

Of the two, I could bet a fortune on Rust and sleep easy about it.

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