Curious, what makes you think Rust isn't be used for "real work"? So far there's a high performance browser (servo + servo components in FF), kernel (Redox), parallelism library (Rayon), grep replacement (ripgrep), all written in Rust, that are somewhere near best-in-class (Redox is debatable but that's mostly due to the fact that the success of an OS requires many non-technical factors).

All this in a language that's ~2 years old is pretty impressive.

Webrender, the next gen rendering/compositing engine for Servo, will become the default renderer for Firefox Nightly at the end of this year and several components like CSS and URL parsing have been in Firefox stable for a while now. That alone puts Rust in the multi-million end user club for some complicated software

Beautiful project- and home page!

What does "word splitting" mean in this context?

Word splitting is the difference between

    $ var='my program.py'
    $ python $var

and

    $ python "$var"

You need double quotes to protect against word splitting. Almost all shell tutorials guides hammer this point home repeatedly, because if you omit double quotes, it works most of the time, and then blows up with incomprehensible error messages when you have spaces.

If you have a filename with spaces, like "my program.py", then python would be invoked with TWO arguments in the first case ["my", "program.py"].

But it will be invoked with single argument in the second case ["my program.py"], which is the correct thing.

I talk about how word splitting is really a hack around the historical lack of arrays in bash here:

"Thirteen Incorrect Ways and Two Awkward Ways to Use Arrays"

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/06.html