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by benreesman 1422 days ago
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.

4 comments

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.
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.

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.

btw, fzf is written in go ^^