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by lambda_dn 1572 days ago
We looked into Rust at our company (top 100) and it's clear it's not ready for production systems. It just puts developers into a huge tar pit fighting with the compiler for anything more than a simple hello world app. If it actually lived up to it's hype it would have been used to rewrite browsers, servers, OSes etc. But C/C++ are still the kings of system programming.
2 comments

Off the top of my head…

Firecracker, the software AWS Lambda runs on, is written in Rust: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

Mozilla wrote Servo, a browser engine, in Rust. Part of it has been integrated into Firefox a while ago:

> Mozilla incorporated the Servo CSS Style engine in release 57 of its Firefox Quantum browser.

https://research.mozilla.org/servo-engines/

It’ll be used in Android: https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-android-plat...

It’ll probably find it’s way into the Linux kernel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485465

The whole reason for Rust's existence was for Servo so using it as an example of its use is disingenuous at best.

Ok one bit of AWS runs on Rust.

C/C++ runs 99% of the the worlds software including OS's/browsers/GUI's/Compilers/Virtual machines/Games/Aircraft/Spacecraft etc etc etc.

"It'll be" same was said of Java

It is and will continued to be used in areas where security is important.

This is from November 2020, I’d expect them to use it even more by now:

> But we also use Rust to deliver services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and more. Recently we launched Bottlerocket, a Linux-based container operating system written in Rust. Our Amazon EC2 team uses Rust as the language of choice for new AWS Nitro System components, including sensitive applications such as Nitro Enclaves.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/why-aws-loves-rust-a...

> The whole reason for Rust's existence was for Servo so using it as an example of its use is disingenuous at best.

Mozilla wanted to push the boundaries of what's possible with a browser rendering engine and they felt like they couldn't do it safely with the existing languages, so they created their own. Doesn't that, alone, speak volumes for how useful Rust is?

> C/C++ runs 99% of the the worlds software including OS's/browsers/GUI's/Compilers/Virtual machines/Games/Aircraft/Spacecraft etc etc etc.

Now you're being disingenuous. Rust is still so young compared to those languages! Not to mention that the industries best served by Rust move glacially slowly compared to, say, the web. I bet we'll see significantly more adoption of Rust in 10-15 years.

While Rust is being used on the system level for Android, there are no plans for the time being, to ever support it for app development on the Android NDK or AGK.
Honestly it's pretty clear from your weirdly large number of negative comments on here that you've never taken a serious look at using the language for a real project. You just have some weird axe to grind with it.

That's cool, I guess, but also not particularly interesting.