[jgilias]

I recently was thinking about how smart/not-smart would it be to become a full-on 'Rust developer'. So I thought, OK, what happens if two decades from now I'm a grey-beard Rust programmer, and the only jobs I can find are maintaining some legacy Rust code...

And then it struck me, I'd be completely fine with it. As in, if there's a language in which dealing with legacy code doesn't seem daunting, then that's Rust. Because of the safety guarantees, the type system, and the 'compiler knows better', refactors are just so much easier. Like, hands down I'd rather maintain Rust code than Python, PHP, JavaScript, or C++.

[ncmncm]

If Rust fizzles, which it still very much could, it will mean you are stuck using a 10-year-old compiler on an ancient OS release.

[jgilias]

In principle, yes. But bear in mind that Rust doesn't depend on a runtime, and compiles to LLVM IR, so what it depends on to run on the target system is a lot less than something like PHP, Python, or JS. So to really end up in deep shit the LLVM project would also have to fizzle together with Rust.

And given how some 'big names' in tech are getting more and more involved in Rust and opting to write core low-level stuff in it, I'm not terribly worried about Rust and LLVM fizzling to the point where I have to worry about any of that. I mean, it is orders of magnitude less of an issue than depending on Node.