[singhrac]

I mostly agree with this sentiment but I think it's not that necessary to point out. Yes, some of these are abandonware but many are written by the same set of strong Rust programmers. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that ripgrep or fd is not a valuable contribution to the OSS ecosystem.

The more interesting question is - why is that? Sure, Rust is memory safe, but I suspect the real reason people built high quality software in Rust is because cargo is good and because minimizing copies is part of the culture around the language. This means that libraries are cheap to use, and as a result programming feels productive, because you don't have a reason to reinvent the wheel (see arrays in C, or various Boost libraries that have been moved into stdlib C++). For example, compare the cost of Python's click to Rust's clap. Or look at serde.

I find it more interesting to ask the question "why do people spend so much hobby time writing interesting programs in Rust?".

[laumars]

> I find it more interesting to ask the question "why do people spend so much hobby time writing interesting programs in Rust?".

Probably for the same reason people spend so much hobby time writing interesting programs in other languages: because they either already have experience in that language and like it or they’re looking for an excuse to learn a new language.

Personally I don’t find it an interesting question to second guess why people have hobbies. Sometimes people enjoy challenges because they’re easy, but sometimes people enjoy challenges because they’re hard. My wife relaxes by watching TV. I relax by writing OSS. Everyone is different.

[Zababa]

> I find it more interesting to ask the question "why do people spend so much hobby time writing interesting programs in Rust?".

My theory is that people that like Rust want to work with Rust, and for that the best way is to prove that it's a good <language> replacement in <space> multiple times. By making modern and good versions of classic CLI tools, they prove that it can replace C in that space. By making good new CLI tools, they prove that it can replace Go (that replaced Python/Ruby) in that space. Some people are trying to replace JS on the frontend (Yew), some people are trying to use it in the backend (Rocket, Actix). Some people working on chromium were (I don't know if they still work on it) trying to prove that it can replace C++/a GC'd language while having the benefits of both. There are lots of examples like that.

Rust often ended up as the most loved language on the stackoverflow survey. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but people in the community seems to understand than marketing is important, and proving your claims is too. And the best way to prove your claims is to deliver working software that's at least as good or better than what was previously made in <language> in <space>, to prove that you could use Rust here.

Of course as you said, cargo really helps here. I'd say other big players are the culture and the type system. The type systems acts as a first layer of documentation and helps ship better code. The culture is also heavily focused on documentation and welcoming newcomers. Compiler errors are a joy to read, rustfmt is a nice addition, clippy is also very good, and people tend to be very nice and welcoming in the community.

What I like with this explanation is that is also in part explains the rewrite it in Rust (RIIR) obsessed people: they see how the community act, fail to understand that delivering working code is the most important part because it's less visible than the "pure marketing" talk, and so blindly repeat the "pure marketing" talk.

[smitherfield]

> because you don't have a reason to reinvent the wheel [in Rust]

This is a somewhat comical statement in a thread about "Rewrite it in Rust."

[b3morales]

Nah, the thread is about people redoing the whole car, adding airbags, swapping out the carburetor, installing power steering, and maybe throwing in a new stereo and a paint job.

sed vs. sd, for example https://github.com/chmln/sd The semi-lovable but reliable old jalopy overhauled to match modern practices.

[deeviant]

> but I suspect the real reason people built high quality software in Rust is because cargo is good

Do we actually have factual evidence that people do write high quality software in Rust.

Something showing the average rust program is "higher quality" than the average C++ program?

[staticassertion]

It's way too hard to build evidence for something like that. Virtually all research into PL effectiveness ends up not account for the absurd number of variables.

[bfrog]

One metric might be how long it takes a developer to build it from scratch given all the esoteric builds in C/C++ land. Another might be lines per cve in a given language. Another still might be time to fix cves per language.

I'm thinking rust would come out on top of those, but would be interesting to measure!

[DoctorOW]

How does one objectively measure quality in a way that isn't dependent on the specific goals the program is trying to accomplish?

[secondcoming]

It's unlikely that this evidence exists, and if the 'clone everything to get past the borrow checker' attitude is commonplace then we get stuck on what 'high quality' means.

[jlg23]

> I find it more interesting to ask the question "why do people spend so much hobby time writing interesting programs in Rust?".

Maybe just as a learning experience or to be able to say "I know $hypedLanguage." Nothing against rust on my side, but at least for me, time spent on writing something in a language new to me is in no relation to my perceived usefulness of that language.

I personally believe that people new to programming love rust because they get compiler feedback instead of runtime errors. Given what is currently en vogue, rust does stand out there. OTOH, if looking at some old, boring languages, you already have that. Minus the hype.