[BoardsOfCanada]

I think memory safety is the killer feature of rust, and has become so because people see the real world problem it's solving, more than through evangelicalism. We'll see in a few years when more "heavy shit" has been written/rewritten in rust. My prediction is that they will have significantly fewer memory safety issues than comparable c++ "heavy shit".

[pjmlp]

Business also needs to care,

> Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law.

-- C.A.R Hoare on his Turing award speech in 1981.

[benreesman]

From where I sit the killer feature of Rust is that a bunch of amazingly cool software is written in it, especially in the terminal. I'm a big terminal guy, and I can't think off the top of my head of anything I use constantly that isn't written in Rust. `rg`, `fzf`, `zoxide`, `bat`, `viddy`, the list goes on and on, I fucking love the shit people are writing in Rust.

And I think that should be the killer feature of a language: that cool software is written in it and is continuing to be written in it. This is a killer feature shared by Rust and C++ and these days to be serious about performant software in diverse settings, you pretty much have to know both well.

[jamincan]

Terminal programs are one area where Rust's strengths seem to align (very good CLI libraries/parsing, error management, and concurrency) and weaknesses are less relevant (async, GUIs), which might be why it seems to be gaining traction in that area.

[benreesman]

I'm embarrassed enough about misattributing like 2/5 to Rust that are written in golang, so I just dumped my minimum (non-work) `home.nix` package list: https://gist.github.com/johnnystackone/bacd9275296f3d5d0cd75....

I'm not going to go through every one and remember/look up which ones are written in Rust, but I'll wager that half-ish of them are.

[mattarm]

Thanks for that list. I'd heard of rg and fzf but not the others.

I immediately thought: well what about Go for command line tools? Is this the viddy you speak of? https://github.com/sachaos/viddy If so, looks like it is written in Go. Looks like fzf too.

[Narew]

btw, fzf is written in go ^^

[matheusmoreira]

> We'll see in a few years when more "heavy shit" has been written/rewritten in rust.

I'd really like to see that. Would be cool to see a completely new Linux user space written in Rust. Not necessarily a rewrite of existing software, new ideas would be great. I tested Linux system calls and they worked very well even though they needed experimental inline assembly functionality to work. With system call support, anything is possible.

[pjmlp]

Once upon a time there was a project to do a Linux distribution in Ada.

Unfortunately it died a couple of years later.

[nibbleshifter]

Slowly there's more and more implementations emerging of Linux userland utils in Rust.

It's taking a while.