> For many, software is considered for production only if it has been 5 years in the wild.
Time is irrelevant, it’s about usage and stability. Every rust crate I rely on has published download numbers, which give you an idea of number of people using it. In that set, they are all open source and published on GitHub or Gitlab, so I can look at the codebases easily.
You can wait, that’s fine. But you do end up missing out on helping shape a new environment that is growing at crazy rates over the last few years.
If you think “download numbers” (or open source, or being in GitHub) is a good metric for measuring reliability, it means you haven’t really worked in any such field.
It isn’t growing _at all_ in many fields, because it is simply way too new (no new software projects started on it), it isn’t certified (or even impossible to certify). That does not mean it is not better, so don’t take that as an attack. It is simply a suicide in risk-analysis to use a new language, new libraries and new compiler front-end in safety-critical projects; so it is a no-go. Similarly for C11, C++14, C++17 and many other languages, frameworks and libraries that you have to approve.
I never have worked in such a field, and you're comments about certification, etc, are definitely things I will accept as true. Getting any support of new technology in any space is hard, and of course takes time.
But, I will say that "download numbers" where there is obvious sustained usage of a project is a stand-in for understanding if something is seeing real-world usage. I don't claim that it show stability, only that if it's usage is high and the number of issues on the project are not growing under that strain then you can begin to get a picture of it's stability.
When you talk about formal proofs, certification, etc. Those are different mechanisms for validating that, but generally requires substantial amounts of money to be done.
However, from plans to actual usage takes years; specially for completely new projects using new languages, compilers, libraries, etc. in safety-critical stuff, that takes months just to validate.
Stating anything else is just either lying (marketing) or ignorance. Please do not do a disservice to your language by creating vacuous hype.
As for flamewars, what are you even talking about? I have not said a single thing in favour of any language. Have you read the thread?
This is bullying: "Prove Rust is controlling critical systems _today_ ".
And this breaks the site guideline against calling names in arguments, as well as returning to personal attack: "Otherwise, please stop spreading bullshit".
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comments need to be considerably more respectful if you want to keep posting here. There are plenty of ways to express your views about programming languages thoughtfully, including if you disagree with someone. It's not hard, if you take the spirit of this site to heart. We'd appreciate it if you'd do that.
As for the rest: I don’t see how asking for proof can be considered “bullying”.
Please review the definition of bullying, because you are trivializing it and therefore hurting actual victims of bullying.
Thank you on behalf of them.
Finally, since it seems HN are in the business of deleting fair comments, I will leave the site and do my best warn others of what is happening here.
Good luck.
I'm not really gonna bother to reply when there's accusations like this.
I do understand everything you're saying. We're not in disagreement about the context. I (or more accurately, bluejekyll, we're talking about the same thing) did provide such a citation, you can take it or leave it.
As for the rest of your argument: in many companies people is still moving to C11 or C++11. For many, software is considered for production only if it has been 5 years in the wild. A library appearing on cargo does not mean it is “available”.