Comment by homebrewer
Comment by homebrewer 3 days ago
It is extremely niche outside of this bubble.
Comment by homebrewer 3 days ago
It is extremely niche outside of this bubble.
To be clear, that developer survey asked:
> Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?
Also, in the same results, just above Rust, I see:
> PowerShell 13.8%
It's popular in the "let's rewrite X in Rust" community which are very actively posting on HN, Reddit and wherever they can. That gives the impression it is not niche.
But the moment you search Rust on LinkedIn, you can see the truth.
> According to Stack Overflow developer survey [0] Rust is at 12.5%, ... So definitely not niche.
The annual survey is very popular in the Rust community. Its results are often used for advocacy. Participation by Rust developers is very high. So what you have is a classic case of a selection bias.
F# will likely remain niche forever. It’s likely that Rust will not given its growing and accelerating adoption by Microsoft, Google and the Linux Kernel.
It just takes time to defeat the 40+ years of c and c++ dominance.
Personally I will always prefer C's simplicity to Rust's complexity. Could be just me.
I find Rust vastly simpler than C. If the code compiles, it's probably a valid expression of the business logic I encoded. I might've screwed up that logic, of course, and no language can prevent me from messing that up. I know! Many have tried, and I've defeated them with my ability to misrepresent my ideas! But at least with Rust, I'm reasonably confident that the code will actually do the thing I asked it to do. I'm never confident like that with C until I've run it a few hundred times without crashing.
(Yes, I'm familiar with the rich ecosystem around helping devs not write crummy C. I worked at Coverity at one point. If anything, that gave me enormous fear and respect of the hoops you have to jump through to be reasonably sure C code isn't completely broken.)
Rust like any language can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. The complexity raises with the performance of the code you write but that’s also true of C. Unlike C that complexity is combined with guarantees that your code won’t crash in weird and unpredictable ways.
I will take C, C++ or Zig over Rust any day. For some people, like me, the Rust way of doing things isn't a good fit. It's not a model I enjoy working with.
I like F#, Haskell, Elixir but not Rust.
According to Stack Overflow developer survey [0] Rust is at 12.5%, roughly a half of C# or Java and a quarter of Python. Also more than twice Ruby. So definitely not niche.
[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...