[pron]

Rust isn't really showing the kind of adoption rate required for long-term success (at least not that exhibited in the past by almost all languages that have achieved long-term success), either. Early adopters tend to be fickle, it seems.

[iterateoften]

Large companies like Meta, Google, etc have Rust as part of their official stack. The market cap of companies that have Rust listed is pretty significant compared to Elixir.

[pron]

Significant compared to Elixir, alarmingly low compared to languages that truly made it. By the way, the moment when large companies start adopting a language is critical. For a language to make it, it must spread like wildfire inside those companies; if it doesn't, that's a huge negative signal to more cautious observers.

[iterateoften]

Not really, Rust can be 1% of the codebase but by Rusts nature it is implemented the most critical paths.

Rust is insanely awesome for embedding. So you can have Python app that 90% of your team works on and embed Rust for the critical parts to optimize.

But I get your point, however Rust is one of the most discussed programming languages in the past year on HN so it must be doing something right.

[pron]

> however Rust is one of the most discussed programming languages in the past year on HN so it must be doing something right.

That's true. It may even be more discussed here than Haskell was five years ago (though not nearly as hyped as Ruby was 15 years ago). Whether or not that's a good sign is up to interpretation, given that HN doesn't have a good record when it comes to market success and HN hype correlation. That's not surprising given that HN is more Vogue/GQ and less NY Times, i.e. it's less focused on what's happening and more on escapist wishes.

[iterateoften]

Not really.

Rust is significantly more discussed than Haskell ever was. Haskell barely ever had more than a couple hundred comments / posts. Rust has thousands.

Haskell was never discussed more than Ruby or Python and you can go to the archives to prove it. This year, Rust is more popular than Ruby and Python combined for discussions on Hackernews.

[pron]

It is also more discussed than TypeScript and maybe about as much as Go was at a similar age if not more, both of which have had a much more positive trajectory. My point is that HN hype is a really bad predictor of success or failure.