> If Rust doesn't find its "killer app" I don't see it rapidly growing like Go (network services, containers) or Swift (everything Apple).
I don't believe that Go or Swift are growing because of their technical merits. Swift is essentially forced by Apple upon any developer who needs to develop applications that run on Apple products, and Go, in spite of its pedigree, can't be sold to newcomers without waving the Google brand.
> Widely displacing C is a pipe dream.
For old projects, sure. Yet, for greenfield projects then, given the choice, Rust does offer quite a lot of sought-after features that C is sorely lacking.
>I don't believe that Go or Swift are growing because of their technical merits. Swift is essentially forced by Apple upon any developer who needs to develop applications that run on Apple products
It's also a very good language, in par with Rust, and with the creator of LLVM behind it, and the creator of Rust (and many other Rust people) working at Apple in Swift.
>Go, in spite of its pedigree, can't be sold to newcomers without waving the Google brand.
And yet, Dart never got anywhere, despite the "Google brand" (and far more support initially, including official branding, an IDE, and having their #1 compiler guy working on it).
I don't believe that Go or Swift are growing because of their technical merits. Swift is essentially forced by Apple upon any developer who needs to develop applications that run on Apple products, and Go, in spite of its pedigree, can't be sold to newcomers without waving the Google brand.
> Widely displacing C is a pipe dream.
For old projects, sure. Yet, for greenfield projects then, given the choice, Rust does offer quite a lot of sought-after features that C is sorely lacking.