[xyzzyz]

Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction. It couldn’t have made much progress by taking similar hands off approach as C, because C is already more than good enough C.

[lr1970]

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

No, Rust is winning because it is 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++. Rust incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility. Rust is winning despite its leadership rather than because of it.

EDIT: elaborated a bit more.

[cbsmith]

In fairness, this reasoning would suggest that any new language developed 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++, that incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility would enjoy the same success, if not more, than Rust.

It seems likely that there are other important factors. It's debatable what they are, but clearly there is a difference of opinion about how much Rust's leadership accounts for why Rust is succeeding more than most.

[conradev]

These things can be true simultaneously. The Rust team can have extremely strong technical leadership and direction while also being incredibly immature when it comes to conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution is hard! I struggle with it as an engineer who wants to please everyone, but I also recognize that it isn't possible to.

Whoever had objections to the talk and was not able to express those objections to their teammates in the proper forum before taking action without their approval is just... immature. It violated trust amongst the Rust leadership team, and trust is everything.

It’s actually even worse, because this person also wielded enough power to represent Rust to RustConf, and did so incorrectly. They seem problematic.

Leading people is always messy and requires the maturity to deal with failures gracefully, and a catastrophic failure from a simple task is not confidence-inspiring. I love Rust, so I hope they get their shit together.

[snovv_crash]

Rust is winning marketshare because it was built ground-up to take advantage of the massive progression of Moore's Law at compile time. Compiling programs written in Rust would have been completely infeasible 20 years ago, it would have simply been too slow.

[adrianN]

C++ doesn't compile that much faster than Rust.

[snovv_crash]

Modern C++, I agree. C++98 is a lot faster to compile though, even the same code using the same standard library calls.

[adrianN]

Having worked on a modestly sized C++98 codebase in the recent past, I don't think I agree. But of course it would need proper benchmarks.

[pphysch]

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

Hmm, not sure about that one. Rust has an enormous hype component to it, more than any other language I'm aware of.

It may have strong technical leadership, but saying it's gaining market share "precisely" because of it is precisely misleading.

[patrick451]

The hype around Julia definitely gives Rust a run for it's money.

[pphysch]

"in Julia" yields 25 pages of results on HN, while "in Rust" has >100 pages alongside other popular langs.

[patrick451]

What's your point? The target market of Julia is mostly scientific, not general purpose computing. That market is almost certain to have a smaller representation on HN. I'd actually contend that for a language with such a targeted to have 25 pages of results HN supports my point rather than debunks it.

[cookieperson]

Julia doesn't even operate in the same space as rust... Julia is closer to go lang than it is to rust and I wouldn't say those two languages are similar at all. Also if I were picking a language on community alone, I'd pick rust. The issues going on here are not reminiscent of the community at all. Julia also had drama over conferences and allowing members to speak...

[patrick451]

So what? Nothing you have said has anything to whatsoever to do with hype.

[deterministic]

Nope. Most languages have strong leadership and zero chance of taking anything from C/C++. And it will takes a very long time for Rust to get even 5% of the C/C++ market. There are more than 6 million C++ programmers out there. And new C++ projects are started every day.