| > Does it infect C/C++ programmers who've dared to sample it once Yes, that is a big part of it. From my very subjective impression, having attended many Rust meetups with a constant influx of newcomers, I would say the two biggest groups that are really longing for Rust are: - C (and sometimes C++) programmers that are looking for a breath of fresh air with modern tooling (e.g. package management) that isn't the result of decades of patchwork upon patchwork - People that would like to work "close to the metal", but in the past were too tormeted by C/C++/Go segfaults(/other memory issues) to approach the subject. (That's also the group that I fall in) > We didn't see this with Lua, Ruby (that was mainly RoR anyways), Python, Swift, C#, certainly not newer-spec C and C++, or any of the others, even Java back in the day. I'm pretty sure we saw a similar hype with Ruby. If you go back ~10 years in the HN archives, you will see about as many "... in Ruby" posts as you see today with Rust. All the other languages listed are too old (I would guess "too old" means predating widespread social media), or have something obvious that alienates a big chunk of developers (e.g. Swift and .NET languages being essentially single-OS languages). > A hyperactive grassroots cheerleader squad? If anything the opposite. In the early days of Rust there existed the self-aware inside joke of the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force". Once people actually tried to meme to much with that (e.g. brigading subreddits), that was strongly rejected from inside the "community". |