[codesections]

> rust rewrite means you are more likely to invite contributions from a larger community

I'd be really interested to know why you think that's the case. Somewhere around 3% of programmers know Rust, while over 20% know C. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology

Naively, I would have thought that a C project would invite contributions from a much larger community. Sure (as I've personally experienced!) the Rust community is friendly and helpful, but we're still small, so I'm curious why you think a rewrite would get more contributions.

[sgeisler]

Not parent, but I'd think twice before contributing to a C code base I'm not completely familiar with in fear of causing some bug/CVE. Rust projects are much nicer for drive-by contributions to projects one uses but isn't generally interested in working on. If you are not working on a security critical part of a system you can be pretty sure not to cause severe bugs like RCEs.

Also for pure rust projects the development environment is easier to set up: cargo+rustc do everything vs. autotools+make+installing system wide libraries+ccache+gcc (just what I've seen in the wild).

[ncmncm]

It is nice to think that 3% of programmers know Rust, but we all know that number is at least two orders of magnitude too large. It would be impossible to defend a claim that 3% of programmers know that Rust is a language.

[fxfan]

That's not how OSS contributions work. C# is wildly popular in enterprise, and most of New york runs on F#. How often do you see .NET repos on Github?

[codesections]

> How often do you see .NET repos on Github?

Well, ok, if we're going by GitHub repos, C has 117k repos with at least one star and Rust has 11k. That doesn't seem to be that different than then number of programmers as a whole.

(FWIW, there are 104k starred C# repos and 2k F# repos, which doesn't seem all that out-of-line with the popularity of those languages as a whole.)