Comment by jnbiche
12 years ago
>I'm hopeful that as the language ecosystem matures there will be increasingly mature C library wrappers and (even better!) native, memory-safe, Rust replacements for things.
This is Rust's greatest promise. Not only is writing memory-safe code possible, but it's also possible for Rust to do anything C is currently doing -- from systems, to embedded, to hard real-time, and so one. The promise of Rust cannot be overstated. And having finally grasped the language's pointer semantics, I've started to really appreciate its elegance. It compares very favorably to OCaml and other mixed paradigm languages with strong functional capabilities.
Promises can be encouraging, but they really do us no good in practice. And it's practice that truly matters.
We really need at least a stable (in terms of the language and its standard libraries) of Rust before it can even be considered as a viable option. Even then, we'll need to see it used seriously in industry for at least a few years by early adopters before it'll be more widely trusted.
We keep hearing about how Rust 1.0 will be available sometime this year, and how there are only a relatively small handful of compatibility-breaking issues to resolve. But until those issues are all resolved and until Rust 1.0 is actually released and usable, Rust just isn't something we can take seriously, I'm afraid to say.
I agree completely. In my opinion, Rust should be looking at reaching a stable language as soon as possible instead of searching for some hard-to-define perfection.
Perfect is the enemy of the good definitely applies here. Any of the last two releases of Rust (0.9 and 0.10) would have made a nice 1.0 release, particularly once managed pointers were moved out from the language core to the standard library.
I also worry about more complexity being added to the language, so the sooner it can reach 1.0, the better. Unfortunately, the Rust community seems to really enjoy bikeshedding, so my hopes for a 1.0 release this year are not very high.
Nonetheless, I've already been wrong about Rust once (re: complexity -- once you learn the admittedly tricky pointer semantics, it's really not that horribly complex). I would love to be proven wrong again.
Good enough can also be the enemy of great. It's a tricky balance. My feeling is that there are already plenty of languages that are mature and stable enough to be good choices for industry but few (if any) that are actively and inclusively defining themselves the way Rust is. It's true that it won't be viable for a good while yet, and that's ok. What's the rush?
A data point: I have a few little Rust projects that rely on some patches to some other libraries; whereas I used to spend above a half-hour compiling and sometimes an hour or two freshening making things compile for the new version, I'm now typically down to about 10 seconds to install the newest nightly and 5 minutes or to fix up some warnings and standard library changes. A stable 1.0 is starting to feel imminent and inevitable to me.