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by rat87
503 days ago
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I think rust was helped by being part of Mozilla and really helped when they got experienced devs (guys who made ruby Bundler) to build the Cargo package manager pre 1.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20221206052719/https://mail.mozi... And helped a bit when they took a lot of stuff out the stdlib into packages for the new package manager. And helped a lot with a heavy focus pretty early on great compiler messages (inspired by elm) and with a focus on tools and documentation more generally. Like a lot of things in life, rust was in the right place at the right time to get popular. I do think the deep want for something better and safer then c++ helped but they made a lot of good choices(not necessarily the best choices but good enough choices) and had some money backing them. I think it was far from inevitable that some other language to compete with c++ would have come out anytime soon if rust hadn't been around (and hadn't made good enough choices). It might have happened but decent chances it wouldn't have. |
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That's one of the reasons Rust became as widespread as it is now. However we are talking about a "what if Rust never existed" scenario. I'm confident that kind of scenario we'd be talking about a different-yet-similar language, maybe one that never got invented in our version of reality, as having the same or similar forces that helped that hypothetical language.
My point is that people wanted a successor to C++. So it was going to happen. In our reality it was Rust. But if Rust wasn't created by Greydon then someone else would have created something else to fill that void.
> I think it was far from inevitable that some other language to compete with c++ would have come out anytime soon if rust hadn't been around (and hadn't made good enough choices). It might have happened but decent chances it wouldn't have.
I very much disagree with this assumption. We have D, ObjectiveC, C#, Zig, Go, OCaml and others born out of the need to to iterate and improve on what came before it. But nothing had really caught on in the domain of safety + zero-cost abstractions principle. And particularly not aimed at C++ devs. It's been a contentious point for years -- a void people have been looking to fill. So it was only a matter of time before something caught on.
But this is all hypothetical. Plus if you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then arguably we're both right :D