[khuey]

> successful industrial open-source (?) projects loved by academics (Rust)

Is Rust loved by academics? And much more importantly in my mind, was it even recognized by academics before it became an industrial success?

The very first published Rust paper that I'm aware of appeared in the "ACM SIGAda Ada Letters" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2692956.2663188). Today that paper is the most cited paper to ever appear in that journal (which has a 4 decade history) and it's not even close. It also has more citations that all but three papers that appeared at PLDI that same year, for comparison. That certainly doesn't suggest to me that it was recognized at the time. This was also published only 6 months before Rust shipped 1.0. It wasn't that early.

My (third-hand and now-decade-old, so take it for the very little it's worth) recollection is that academic forums weren't interested in Rust because nothing in it is particularly novel in a PL theory sense (a point Graydon himself made from the very beginning, see slides 6 and 7 at http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf). But it did package those ideas into something that was practically usable for industry and at this point the results speak for themselves.

IMO this is a good example of why a lot of "practitioners" in industry wouldn't bother trying to publish anything in a forum dominated by academics.

[pcwalton]

Yes, all Rust papers anyone tried to submit were consistently rejected up until Rust became popular, at which point Rust became the hot new thing in applied programming language research. Academic PL is very insular (to its detriment, I'm convinced).