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by jeffdavis
3423 days ago
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"But the problem with that is that the market that really really can't use GC is vanishingly tiny." Even if that's true (which I don't believe), tiny markets have a way of expanding when new offerings are available. New people are getting involved in OS development in rust, for instance. We might see some really interesting stuff happen there. The same thing may happen with databases and rust. And you didn't address my example, which was all of those "-devel" packages you need to install to get all of those libraries that so much software depends on: libssl, libjpeg, etc. "Rust throws the baby out with the bathwater and tries to pressure others into thinking that they are in this market." And this has what ill effect? |
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> New people are getting involved in OS development in rust, for instance.
Tiny market. Expanding it to be slightly less tiny doesn't make it non-tiny. More importantly, positioning Rust as an operating systems programming language will not get people to use it for more general application programming.
> The same thing may happen with databases and rust.
Also a tiny market. Also, not sure how wrestling with the Rust compiler will advance database theory or practice. Even more importantly, the implication (in the context of the thread) that it's impossible to write a database system in a GC language is false. To optimize the implementation, you may probably want to avoid GC in the innermost hot parts. That would be possible with the hypothetical Rust-with-optional-GC I mentioned above.
> And you didn't address my example, which was all of those "-devel" packages you need to install to get all of those libraries that so much software depends on: libssl, libjpeg, etc.
I don't know what exactly you mean by that since you even need those packages for C programming, and you need them (or something equivalent to the headers they provide) for Rust, but yes, language interoperability is hard, and yes, some language runtimes make it harder than it should ideally be.
> And this has what ill effect?
Many people will read stuff about OS kernels and database systems and vaguely elitist but never concretized ramblings about "systems programming", coupled with "OMG, everything must always be super-fast at the expense of programmer productivity" and decide that they are not in this market. And then they will keep using Python. Or, just to rub it in, Go for "systems programming" like NTPsec. <shrug> I never said that that's a bad thing; I just said that this will not drive more general Rust adoption.