Safer Enums in Go

Re:Safer Enums in Go by CraigJPerry on Saturday May 14, 2022 @12:26PM (#31379560)

>> Rust's popularity

Is Rust actually popular? I know that question is inviting downvote oblivion on here but on the off chance of attracting a thoughtful comment (and because I secretly want to really fall for rust, i love the idea and think we badly need the next step on from C-based foundations, but the pragmatic side of me just rolls around laughing at rust) here’s where i’m coming from:

    - There’s not much in the way of job postings
    - There’s no halo product yet, servo appears to have gone nowhere? If it makes it into Linux *that* will launch the lang for sure
    - There’s no halo company championing it, mozilla has never moved away from churning out c++ and js primarily, microsoft made some noise but then crickets
    - it’s been around about as long as Go yet its google trends search traffic is around 1/16th that of Go’s
    - The only large rust code bases on github are servo and the rust compiler/stdlib itself

The only metric i can find where rust scores well is the stack dev survey and the number of tutorials posted online. If there was actual traction alongside these two metrics, rust would be a rocketship. But without any obvious successes in the world so far, it’s beginning to look like a handy way to identify devs susceptible to stockholm syndrome.

There’s all sorts of weird signs in the community that makes me think the median rust “user” has a rust career something like:

    1. Downloaded rust
    2. Installed the wrong plugin in VSCode (why is the correct plugin - rust analyzer - so low on downloads and votes, yet the dead plugin is still getting tons of traffic? Is noone actually reading the documentation?)
    3. Followed a hello world tutorial, marveled at the genuinely awesome compiler errors
    4. Full of enthusiasm, started a side project and… gave up after a few nights but who knew, they wanted to solve a problem not add lifetimes onto the existing stack of problems to wrestle with.

AFAICT the future’s not looking bright for rust right now. It’s coasting on a wave of enthusiasm from relatively junior developers who aren’t making impressive things with the language yet.

This is a strongly typed language with lifetimes understood by the compiler - that’s a rocket suit compared to a language like the tire fire that is javascript. Enums? Pah excuse me while i pass a string literal…

With this rust exo-skeleton surrounding a developer, it should be unlocking the ability to manage 10million+ LOC code bases like it’s hello world.

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Re:Safer Enums in Go by stouset on Saturday May 14, 2022 @02:17PM (#31380746)

Reframing your question, it's incredibly impressive how popular Rust has become without a halo product, halo company, etc. Rust proponents will readily argue that Go is only as popular as it is because of being championed by Google. Meanwhile Rust has had to grow to the place where it is organically.

My personal belief is that over time Rust will inevitably eclipse C and C++. But it will take time. C and C++ will never fully go away, but projects that would have been written in them will be over time be preferentially written in Rust. The Linux kernel starting to write drivers in it is a harbinger of this, and once that effort has made it into released kernels we'll quickly start to see other parts of the kernel adopt Rust.

> AFAICT the future’s not looking bright for rust right now. It’s coasting on a wave of enthusiasm from relatively junior developers who aren’t making impressive things with the language yet.

Frankly this is my perspective of Go, which is (from my vantage point) mostly popular amongst junior developers. Rust is not even remotely marketed towards novices, and in many of the communities it's openly acknowledged that it's perhaps not the best choice for someone just setting out. C and C++ programmers are the ones primarily flocking toward Rust, while Python, Ruby, and Node developers are the ones who are primarily adopting Go as they're starting to see the value of static types, even as anemic as Go's type system is.

Anecdotally I know many, many engineers who have grown disillusioned with Go once they've worked on larger projects and had to repeatedly reinvent wheels that other languages provide as built-in features. Many of those engineers have gone on to champion Rust, and the flow of engineers between those two languages from my point of view heavily favors Rust.

But without a big champion like Microsoft, Google, or Sun/Oracle, this growth is going to happen organically and take time. Maybe there will be an enormous driver like Kubernetes for Go, Rails for Ruby, or ML for Python, but even without that I think Rust will gradually continue to snowball.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Safer Enums in Go by CraigJPerry on Saturday May 14, 2022 @04:20PM (#31381931)

>> incredibly impressive how popular Rust has become

But it hasn’t become popular yet, it’s not competing with something like Go or C++, it’s competing with Erlang or Clojure for popularity

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2021/4

P.s. thumbs up, that was a thoughtful reply! But the predictable down votes arrived too :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Safer Enums in Go by pjmlp on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:51AM (#31394508)

Mozilla and Firefox.

Or do you think anyone would care if it was some random joe/jane posting about this Rust language they were developing.

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