Both Windows and Android are shipping, today, with meaningful components written in Rust. Amazon S3 and Lambda are built on top of Rust. Apple is hiring Rust developers and they post about it on this platform [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40849188]. Dropbox and Discord backend services are written in Rust. Cloudflare uses Rust very extensively in their infrastructure, which means that a large fraction of global internet traffic passes through routers and servers written in Rust. The UEFI firmware implementation of the next Surface products by Microsoft is written in Rust.
You are simply incorrect. Instead of arguing I will suggest that you do a slight modicum of research into who is using Rust and for what. While it won't be comparable in omnipresence with C and C++ for a long time, it is widely-enough used that there is a near-zero chance that you are not already using some tool or service that directly or indirectly uses Rust for some significant purpose. It is not a "forum and hobby project language". The list I just provided is also by no means complete - Shopify, Disney, Facebook, Firefox... and many others... also use Rust.
"According to Weston, Microsoft has already rewritten 36,000 lines of code in the Windows kernel in Rust, in addition to another 152,000 lines of code it wrote for a proof of concept DirectWrite Core library, and the performance is excellent with no regressions compared to the old C++ code. He also called out that “there is now a syscall, in the Windows kernel, written in Rust.”
Whatever experience you have is out of date with the current reality. Not only is there interest in using Rust in these core areas, but it has already started happening.
Thanks for eloquently responding to the GP comment... My own thoughts have been with Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla and Amazon actively backing Rust, it is definitely not something that will just go away.
Personally, I've only done surface level things (API middle tier dev) with a few different Rust frameworks (Axum, etc) and it's been relatively nice for the level of performance and low overhead compared to Node, C# and others. And what lower level code I've read has been particularly pleasant to come to understand.
While doing something like a global cache in Rust feels awkward as all hell, many other patterns just feel really nice to use. I like the semantics of the language itself. I do hope that certain enterprise patterns typical in Java and the C# communities don't come into play in Rust though.
> Rust kids need to quit tricking other entry level aspiring OS devs into wasting their time learning this language.
In that case, C/C++ developers need to quit tricking the rest of the world that C/C++ is a suitable language for anything security related and - for commercial
products - take responsibility for the economic and social impact for the data breaches due to memory safety issues.
(I really don't care if it's Rust, Java, C#, whatever.)
Hmmm. Is this serious or facetious? Or could be either, depending on the response? There already is rust code in the Linux kernel (some drivers), afaik.
Linus strategy on Rust is genius, albeit immoral. — Don't engage the movement head-on, make concessions where it doesn't matter. — Nobody wants to write drivers? No problem, have THEM write the drivers where the impact is minimal. I believe, if Rust people really understood how they're being used exactly, they wouldn't bother with it, and would go on to write more impactful code. And yet, Linus had managed to execute this strategy perfectly; the insult is subtle enough not to cause major injury.
I seriously doubt it's meant as an insult so much as to minimize near term impact in case there are (and likely will be) mistakes to the larger ecosystem. Creating clearer separations for where Rust can make more sense initially is important. Not just for Rust, but C/C++ and other future languages all around.
The file system is an area where Rust can make a lot of sense, similar for network drivers. Points of interaction with underlying hardware and external systems where well defined controls are all the more important and widely interacted with.
I would be surprised, if within a decade a lot of the use of OpenSSL isn't displaced with rustls across a lot of applications even if not written in Rust directly.
> Linus strategy on Rust is genius, albeit immoral. — Don't engage the movement head-on, make concessions where it doesn't matter. — Nobody wants to write drivers? No problem, have THEM write the drivers where the impact is minimal.
Using telepathy to explain someone’s unstated intention to undermine some programming language’s use in the kernel with this House of Cards plotline makes you look insane btw.
Someone's gotta get the word out, I'm seriously sick of all these ridiculous LARPers trying to magic Rust into existence
Rust is a joke, it's a complete waste of time and effort to try and use it. It's the EU cookie law of native code - well-intentioned nonsense that doesn't work at all in reality
