Re:Why Go and Rust are not competitors
by tedunangst on Thursday July 02, 2015 @10:43AM
(#9819186)
It's not remarkable to me that Ken and Rob would consider whatever language all that stuff in /usr/bin is written in to be a system language. "The language that runs in supervisor mode" seems like a pretty narrow definition.
It was funny that the first response to "Oh but it can't compete with C" was "Well, we meant systems programming language to be more like back-end web servers not your traditional systems programming..." Now, had that come from other people I might have believed, but I cannot imagine Ken and Rob had no idea what a systems programming language was and just got a little confused.
But based on that blog post it is clear that they did want a better C or better C++.
In the end they did a mini-pivot and instead got a better Python|Node.js|Ruby + types + better concurrency + easier_dependencies_and_deployment, which worked out pretty well. So they see a lot of developers from those ecosystem jumping to them. But anyone familiar with an advanced type system (Java, C#, C++, ...) might not get as excited about. interface{} as void* -- yeah no thanks, this is not 1999 anymore.