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205 points michidk | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.609s | source
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skwee357 ◴[] No.41835625[source]
As someone who is using Rust in production for a year now [0], albeit in a different industry -- webdev, I really like the language. Sure, the first steps were rough, but eventually DX became decent, and the safety guarantees of Rust allow me to have a safe mind when developing and deploying (something I can't say about other popular dynamic languages).

Having said that, I agree with one of the commenters in this thread: Rust is essentially a solution looking for a problem. It is a great language, but it fails to find its niche. Rust developers are nowhere to be found, companies are not hiring Rust developers (except if you want to work in crypto).

[0]https://yieldcode.blog/post/one-year-of-rust-in-production/

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pornel ◴[] No.41836127[source]
If you wouldn't write your program in C or C++, then it's not the problem that Rust is trying to solve.

Rust has some nice high-level features and tools, so it gets used in other areas like web dev too, but in the end, it is a systems programming language. It is a low-level language, even though it may not feel like that a lot of the time.

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skwee357 ◴[] No.41836297[source]
I disagree.

Let's say I want to use a real type-safe language to write web applications. So rails/python/JavaScript/php is out of the window. I'm left with two big options: Java/Kotlin and C#. If I want to avoid Microsoft, I'm left with Java. And in fact, this is the industry standard for "real" web development: financial, enterprise, etc.

But Java is cumbersome. It's very `FizBazBarFooAbstractInterface` type of cumbersome. Kotlin makes it nicer, but Kotlin didn't get much adoption in the web industry. C/C++ is too low level for web development. Rust is the perfect language, in my opinion of course, to fill this niche.

Oh, there is also Go. Which is, by the way, also a system programming language. But nobody argues that Go shouldn't be used to write web services.

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1. creata ◴[] No.41836556[source]
Besides popularity (not denying that popularity is important!) is there a reason you'd prefer Rust over OCaml?
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2. skwee357 ◴[] No.41836919[source]
Never considered. I grew up coding in C, so always wanted to come back to something similar. After being spoiled by PHP/JS, couldn't go back to C/C++. Rust offered me a modern, C-like language, so I just learned it and applied forcefully wherever I could.
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3. creata ◴[] No.41837083[source]
Makes sense, thanks.