Re:Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
by timw4mail on Friday June 12, 2020 @09:11AM
(#23498848)
Not really. While there is a growing set of web-based application for Rust, it's not like PHP, where the very purpose of the language is the web. Rust is a system language before it is a web language.
WASM as a target is actually a great indication that it's a system language -- performance is a primary consideration.
Re:Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
by _bxg1 on Friday June 12, 2020 @10:35AM
(#23499614)
You're missing the point. The point is that Rust came from Mozilla. Its mind-share started with web people and is expanding from there. What I'm trying to get across is that those social forces can matter more for adoption than just the tech's appropriateness, considered in a vacuum.
Re:Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
by setr on Friday June 12, 2020 @12:41PM
(#23500979)
In that case, it came from Mozilla for working on a web browser, with primary goals of security, building sandboxes & language runtimes (js), and replacing an application-level cross-platform C++ core.
Which is very different than "web people", which in my mind implies webdev -- html/css/js + API server/db/caching backend.
Which also further explains why WASM is so far along (sandbox, security), much better than any association with webdev itself; but not kernel-level system development. (But if the web browser is an userspace OS... then it's probably not that far from it)
Rust, culturally, comes from the web. That's why it has the most traction in the web server/WASM space for now. It's starting to poke its head into Systems use-cases because of the sheer weight of its memory safety benefits there. Maybe in a few years it'll get some real use in the games industry (real industry; not just enthusiasts), though Unreal remains a bastion of C++ that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But then there are some dark corners of C/C++'s territory that move even more slowly, and where the cultural shift will take a long time. I think to a great extent, embedded falls into that category.