But I don't think I've ever seen any other community (except C++, 20 years ago, perhaps?) being so vocal about wanting to rewrite the whole software ecosystem in their language. "Rewrite it in Rust" is basically a catchphrase now.
> But I don't think I've ever seen any other community (except C++, 20 years ago, perhaps?) being so vocal about wanting to rewrite the whole software ecosystem in their language.
True. I suppose the main difference is that nobody (in their right mind) was ever advocating for rewriting fundamental system components such as Linux (the kernel) and all the GNU system utilities in Java/Perl/JavaScript. If they were, then I completely missed them.
I think that's mostly because there hasn't been any new mainstream language with the feature set and compilation model needed to port fundamental system components for a while. I remember lengthy debates about porting just about everything from C to C++ in the Linux world and even C++ was deemed unsuited for many reasons (with which I generally agree).
It turns out that Rust is compelling enough that it makes sense to investigate porting lots of things to it. I don't think anybody knows for sure exactly for which projects Rust is better than C (or C++), but I know that Google has ported many fundamental C++ projects to Rust and they're happy enough that they're continuing this trend.
But I don't think I've ever seen any other community (except C++, 20 years ago, perhaps?) being so vocal about wanting to rewrite the whole software ecosystem in their language. "Rewrite it in Rust" is basically a catchphrase now.