
Ask HN: Why Rust is becoming popular? - gilgamesh3
In the recent times, Rust is becoming very popular, and used more and more by people and companies, but why? What is the pros and cons of Rust? Rust does not even have a spec.
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topspin
Having a "spec" is not a prerequisite to popularity. Perhaps you believe it
should be, but it is not.

Rust is effective, reasonably well documented, fully open and delivers
something novel; bare metal performance with low defects in a practical
language. I find no surprise that this has led to popularity. Just the idea of
it was popular before people could really get their hands on it.

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watergatorman
Rust popular?

Tiobe language rankings for May 2019:

Rust is ranked 34th at 0.335%, below Lisp and Prolog. Go is ranked 19th at
1.114%. C is ranked 2nd at 14.233%

Rust does not have a stable, standard BNF grammar specification. The language
reference document for Rust has 33 or 34 unspecified missing language
definitions [see "FIXME" sections].

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vorg
Even if the Tiobe rankings said Rust was popular, it wouldn't mean much. Their
May 2019 rankings also say Apache Groovy has risen from #91 to #17 over the
past 12 months, which is clearly wrong. Those rankings are being fiddled with
via search engines such as Baidu.

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wmf
It's both safe and very efficient (no GC, zero-cost abstractions). There
aren't many languages in that niche so Rust has taken it over.

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sidcool
I am not sure if it's already famous. What got my attention was that it
simplified systems programing. I don't have a C/C++ background, Rust was my
first attempt to learn a low level language. It's been rewarding so far.

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oconnor663
There are many safe languages, but Rust is the only safe language with
destructors.

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rurban
This is untrue. Rust is unsafe in all aspects they are claiming to be safe.
It's better than C, C++, or Go, but still type unsafe, memory unsafe and
concurrency unsafe.

They are popular due to the wrong hype around their "safeties", and having a
healthy community.

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oconnor663
If you're concerned about the definition of a word, please go ahead and say
what definition you prefer, rather than just saying "I disagree."

