[ncmncm]

Everyone was way more confident about the future of Ada, and with better reasons.

If you imagine the borrow checker does not drive away a large majority of prospective users, you live in a dream world.

If you imagine the still-slow compiler does not drive away users, you live in a dream world.

Wishful thinking is always a poor substitute for corrective action.

[V_Terranova_Jr]

> Everyone was way more confident about the future of Ada, and with better reasons.

Is Ada really good support for your argument? Ada's heyday was well prior to the ubiquity of the Internet, had no focus on ergonomics, etc. Its initial adoption target was far more niche than Rust aims to be. I agree with you that there is a certain window in which to achieve relevancy, and that probably has much to do with why newer Ada versions haven't really achieved critical mass. On the other hand, Rust is being used in places from desktop software utilities (e.g., ripgrep) to large internal SaaS codebases. The field of potential Rust developers is far richer than I think Ada ever had.

[ncmncm]

Ada had literally billions of dollars in contracts backing it, a detailed specification, multiple industrial-grade implementations, tooling companies betting livelihoods on it, and university engineering programs teaching it. How many of those does Rust have? Any? Ada fizzled.

I have not needed to know of any important programs coded in Rust in general use. Ripgrep does not qualify. Alacritty does not qualify. (Haskell has, anyway, Pandoc and Git-annex.) I guess fragments of Firefox are coded in it. I like that Firefox is less crashy than a decade ago, but I doubt Rust is responsible: I think sandboxing gets that credit.

It is possible that Rust could become important someday, but only if things are done to make it so, most particularly acting not to drive away, for readily fixable reasons, a large majority of people who try it out for the first time.

[nynx]

Maybe you misunderstood. Rust is already used widely in certain industries and quickly growing in many others. It’s not a question of if rust will succeed at this point. It already has. It’s soon to be allowed in upstream Linux kernel drivers, for example.

[ncmncm]

Certainly you misunderstood: more people pick up C++ for production use every week than the total employed today coding Rust. That will be true next year, too. More are employed coding Ada than Rust. More code Erlang than Rust. More code Forth than Rust. Rust is not "used widely" by any defensible definition.

It still seems possible that Rust could, someday, come to be used widely, beyond the HN echo chamber, but only with serious action. Wishful thinking has always reliably failed to drive mainstream language adoption.

[V_Terranova_Jr]

> More are employed coding Ada than Rust.

> More code Forth than Rust

Not trying to be a dick, but do you have any evidence you can point to for these claims? I find them to be surprising and unlikely.

[ncmncm]

You are welcome to offer your own selection of old, niche languages used more, industrially, than Rust.

But, you do know that Postscript is a Forth, right?