> must be really telling something positive about this language and its community.
It's because it's the new shiny thing. This basically used to be a ruby on rails post-it board, then C# for a while, then Java when Java 8 Streams were announced, then Go, etc.
I am not saying it's a bad thing -- in fact I can't wait to go through that "write an OS in Rust" blog that was posted here earlier -- but no I don't think it's telling of anything quite yet.
It's not just because it's shiny. Rust happens to (a) be a great fit for the parts of WebAssembly that have been implemented so far (partly because it doesn't need GC), and (b) have done a really good job of building WebAssembly tooling with nicer ergonomics than other languages.
Even though the DOM story hasn't been figured out, firefox has recently done work to make WASM <-> JS calls performant. So now things like Yew will probably be usable from a performance standpoint[0]. But apart from the DOM, it's good for CPU intensive things[1].
As a child raised on 80s 8-bit computers, and a fan of emulation, I love what WASM does for in-browser emulators. You can run an enormous amount of Apple II, Commodore 64, etc. software on archive.org, all compiled using emscripten.
I regularly hit a search [1] to pick up Rust related stories. Most Rust-related articles don't make the front page and most see no comment activity at all.
Lately the WASM+Rust stories see a lot of activity. Also, some 'I learned Rust and this is what I think about it' type blog posts attract comments. The rest do not. 10 hours ago: "Ask HN: Rust, anyone?" asking who is using Rust in production. No replies.
It's because it's the new shiny thing. This basically used to be a ruby on rails post-it board, then C# for a while, then Java when Java 8 Streams were announced, then Go, etc.
I am not saying it's a bad thing -- in fact I can't wait to go through that "write an OS in Rust" blog that was posted here earlier -- but no I don't think it's telling of anything quite yet.