Re:Announcing Rust 1.7
by unfamiliar on Thursday March 03, 2016 @04:09PM
(#11220053)
This is a really excellent summary, I think it really says a lot more than the previous summaries I've heard which put a lot of emphasis on the safety bit. That is of course a very important aspect, but I feel like over emphasising it sells Rust short. I'm most excited about it for parts 2 and 3, part 1 is just a bonus.
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Re:Announcing Rust 1.7
by steveklabnik on Thursday March 03, 2016 @04:15PM
(#11220088)
Thanks. It's easy to get lost in the safety bit, because from a PLT perspective, it's the most interesting. But there's a lot more going on.
Sean Griffin, the current maintainer of ActiveRecord, has been writing an ORM in Rust. He specifically has been saying quite a bit that the safety aspect is almost irrelevant to him, he sees Rust as a "practical Haskell".
It's also true that there's a lot of stuff we have that's _because_ of safety but isn't interesting because of safety. For example, memory safety is at the core of our concurrency story, but the end result is "compile-time errors for concurrency bugs", which is much more interesting than "safety".
TL;DR: marketing is difficult. Messaging is tough.