The project had had a string of governance issues recently. The old leadership structure fell apart (2 years ago) due to irreconcilable disagreements, then the informal temporary replacement governance, due to a sequence of miscommunications and process failures, committed a major slight against a prominent C community member who had been scheduled to speak at a Rust conference (1 week ago). Said temporary governance system is currently (as in, should be done in 1-2 days max) being replaced by the new permanent governance council, which will hopefully improve things.

In any case, Rust is unlikely to fail because it is the only viable option in its niche (safe systems programming language that can replace C++ everywhere), and has gotten a large amount of investment from major corporations.

I wouldn't say it definitely owns that niche, yet, until there is empirical evidence of how using Rust correlates to safer software. Until then, I think it's a hope founded on a substantive argument (ie. the borrow checker) that is still at risk of not achieving its goals.

The Android team posted something on that topic about 6 months ago [0, HN discussion at 1].

One potentially relevant highlight:

> To date, there have been zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code.

> Historical vulnerability density is greater than 1/kLOC (1 vulnerability per thousand lines of code) in many of Android’s C/C++ components (e.g. media, Bluetooth, NFC, etc). Based on this historical vulnerability density, it’s likely that using Rust has already prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from reaching production.

The post has more details, and I think the entire thing is worth a read.

[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819616

As a rust mostly-outsider, I saw some recent drama (of the interpersonal kind) related to some unilateral action taken by a member of the rust team without a consensus, to downgrade someone’s conference talk, but I haven’t heard of anything that fundamentally impacts the language today. If they alienate their community, maybe in the long term there may be issues, but I certainly don’t make language decisions based on drama in the community. I may have easily misread this though, and would be happy to hear if it’s something bigger than it seemed to me.

> Having seen a few references on here to Rust kicking the bucket…is that a risk with Rust?

IMO Rust is long past the point (in terms of real world usage, commercial backing, etc) where it might “kick the bucket”.

No.

There is a lot of drama in the project leadership (and has been since the beginning), but that's mostly irrelevant to people just using the language. This latest flareup is about a conference keynote speaker, not something relevant to the language itself.

If the project becomes dysfunctional enough, it can always be forked, as it is fully OSS.