Rust: A quest for performant, reliable software [video]

> "How Rust Won"

I love Rust, I'm a fan of writing it and I love the tooling. And I love to see it's (hopefully) getting more popular. Despite this, I'm not sure if "won" is the right word because to my very uneducated eyes there is still considerable amount of Rust not succeeding. Admittedly I don't write so much Rust (I should do more!) but when I do it always baffles me how tons of the libraries recommended online are ghost town. There are some really useful Rust libraries out there that weren't maintained for many years. It still feels like Rust ecosystem is not quite there to be called a "successful" language. Am I wrong? This is really not a criticism of Rust per se, I'm curious about the answer myself. I want to dedicate so much more time and resources on Rust, but I'm worries 5 to 10 years from now everything will be unmaintained. E.g. Haskell had a much more vibrant community before Rust came and decent amount of Haskellers moved to Rust.

The most interesting slide IMO:

  The diaspora

  Mozilla laid off much of the Rust team in August 2020
    - Hacker News discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819
  ~everybody landed at a big tech company
  Result: Rust knowledge well distributed around industry
  No one company dominates
    - In contrast to Java, Swift, Go, C#, Dart
  Strong sense of collaboration & common mission
    - You can really feel this at conferences

Nice! I've wanted to give a similar talk. My thesis is that Rust won on usability above all else. If you look at the semantics of Rust, it's essentially an ML style language with typeclasses and linear types. In some alternate history that's a PhD thesis by someone at Inria that exactly 4 people use. But by making the language actually usable with good errors, familiar syntax (yes, syntax matters!), and documentation, Rust got users. I don't want to get into an in depth comparison but if you look at the documentation of even the most popular functional languages, it's not even close. And they've had a head start of decades!

I’m glad not completely off with my bet 5 years ago that Rust will get larger chunk of the market. With the spread of AI Rust feels like a good candidate among Typescript and Python giants in a an era of coding assistant tools that needs a good nudge like Rust compiler.

Slides from video description

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SoDsm_m_pb_gS6Y98Hgh...

I was wondering where I recognized your name before, before I realized you're the linebender guy.

Hello! Big fan of your UI research