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by jasode 3452 days ago
>It's worse than the phase Java went through when it hit its peak.

As a person who lived through the 1990s Java hype and had a bookshelf full of the official Java books (Addison-Wesley white books)[1], the Rust evangelism is nowhere near that level.

To refresh the memory, 1990s Java evangelists predicted:

1) C/C++ would become obsolete because in the age of abundant desktop resources (cpu power and more RAM), the GC would take care of all that

2) Java's "write-once-run-anywhere" JVM would render the Windows operating system obsolete and weaken the evil Microsoft

3) Java applets so you could create rich dynamic websites in the browser

As we now know, none of that actually happened. Java is still a success but it couldn't match the breathless press it initially received.

Yes, this particular Rust blog promising "salvation" seems to defy Fred Brook's more conservative "no silver bullet".[2] But relatively speaking, Rust's enthusiastic community is fairly tame.

[1] http://imgur.com/a/8gLe4

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

2 comments

Many of those failures were more political than technical.

For example, the internal wars between Windows and DevTools divisions at MSFT, were the biggest reason for Longhorn's failure.

MSR with Midori has proven the viability of using C# for systems programming, when no politics are in play and everyone is focused on technical improvements.

Has Longhorn failure been documented publicly ? I'd love to read about it in details.
Yes, kind of.

This is my personal view of the matter, based on MS blogs, talks, papers and how their technology has been presented to those more MS savy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11828585

If you follow the OP of the comment there is another view being presented.

There are lots of conspiracy theories about what went wrong, regardless how much truth each one has, the real matter is that politics played a bigger role than technical issues.

Java/Sun really could've been a serious threat to Microsoft. Microsoft knew this, which is why they rushed to create a competitor (.NET).
They were actually doing it with COM, just decided to go with a VM instead because of that.

Now we have UWP as that idea was brought back to life.