[gbaygon]

I cannot seem to grasp the scope of this language, so please if any of you fellow gentlemen could enlighten me, i would like to know:

What plans does mozilla have for Rust?

What are the projected applications?

What personal project could be an ideal use case for it?

Thanks!

[wmf]

It's basically a replacement for C/C++, but safer, with more functional flavor, and better support for parallel programming. If used properly, Rust should be faster than Java or Go because it can create non-garbage-collected objects. Mozilla is writing a parallel browser called Servo in Rust.

[zura]

When a company declares some language X as a replacement for C/C++, X actually becomes replacement, or to be more precise, attracts engineers from some other language L, but C/C++ stays in place :)

[wladimir]

If they can make a safer, more secure and less verbose C/C++, without giving up on what makes C/C++ a good choice for some projects (low-level control and performance), I'm sure some people will switch (I know I will). It's just that no one succeeded in this before.

It's just too easy to shoot yourself in the foot with the current C/C++. Combined with developers overestimating themselves and a lack of static checking by compilers, this results in all kinds of hard-to-debug and hard-to-find issues. A language that guarantees no dangling NULL pointers, no buffer overflows and safe concurrency/parallelism is a great promise, at least.

Hopefully it gains enough critical mass. We'll see where this goes...

[jk4930]

Look at Ada (Ada 2012 came out this year). Safer and more secure, not less verbose though. You can do real-time, parallel, distributed, reliable stuff with it. Try the OSS GNAT compiler (comes with your gcc or look at http://libre.adacore.com/ ).

[sbmassey]

Frequently, yeah, but the Rust developers seem to actually have some idea what makes C/C++ successful, so I think it stands a better chance than Java/C#/Go.

[darkstalker]

Wasn't D the replacement of C++?

[gbaygon]

thanks!