[potatochup]

At my $BIGCORP, we have a multi-mode (discrete/continuous) simulation engine written in Rust. It has to be extremely fast, and interface with both firmware written in C, and scripts written in Python. C++ was the only other viable option, but none of us were confident writing safe and performant C++, so we picked rust instead.

Now that I've been using rust for ~5 years, I reach for rust for when I have to do almost anything else. I write small backend services in rust[1], and small utilities that would previously have been python scripts[2]. The only thing I still use any other language for is python for writing test scripts + interactive data exploration, and typescript for front end stuff. We still use a lot of C for firmware because the Rust target support isn't as good as C yet.

[1] you might argue that Go might be better suited for this, but I disagree. The lack of null safety and less strict typing would come back to bite me a lot. A typical backend service we write is 10x simpler than our simulation engine so 1) compile times are approx the same as the project is small and 2) we usually don't care that much about performance for these services so we can just clone or RC away any problems we might have with the borrow checker. Swift might be a nice, but the ecosystem isn't there for backend apps last time I looked.

[2] Total LoC for small scripts ends up being about the same for python/rust in my experience. Development time is approx the same, but I much prefer maintaining small rust apps when I come back to it after 6 months. You _can_ set up safe and maintainable python projects with external libraries for validation, but its too much effort when rust has it all out of the box. Also, python deployment/venv management is still immensely frustrating