Thanks for the details. In all honesty I am probably not a target for Rust anyway, I almost never use C++ for systems programming, but rather for (cross-platform) application development. It would seem that neither Rust nor Go serve this area and probably do not intend to do it either.
As someone who has researched using Rust for a cross-platform GUI application and looked at Servo for ideas of how to do so, I think the libraries for the GUI layer are still very immature. Servo is mostly a rendering engine that draws its final product directly to a canvas, which is great for the content area of a browser window, but different than what most GUI applications need. (Definitely interested in being corrected by the far more knowledgeable Servo developers here.)
Having said that, immature libraries are to be expected at this point, and I do think Rust is very well positioned to have really good ones for this use case in the short to medium term.
> the libraries for the GUI layer are still very immature.
This is absolutely true, but that's a different concern than "It would seem that neither Rust nor Go serve this area and probably do not intend to do it either," which is what I'm curious about.
One of the open questions with GUI toolkit stuff is that Rust does not have named parameters, but Qt, for example, uses them heavily.
I've only based my impression on a cursory look on the Rust API docs, so I might be wrong, but I did not find any references to database libraries, UI toolkits, multimedia and so on. I did not know about Servo, so I will have to look into it. Will the cross-platform components from Servo be included in the Rust standard library?
To give you some background about the kind of apps I was referring to - I am right now working on a UI-driven app that will be deployed to Android and on the desktop. I am using C++, Qt and platform code where necessary.
All of those things are being built yet, so we don't have much to link to. There are a few work-in-progress things, for example, the postgres adapter is coming along, and rust-graphics for graphical primitives. As we get closer to release, and as they mature, we'll feature them more.
> Will the cross-platform components from Servo be included in the Rust standard library?
As we already have a package manager, I think Rust will tend to have a smaller standard library, and encourage its use more. We'll see though.
> am right now working on a UI-driven app that will be deployed to Android and on the desktop.
We support Windows, Mac, and Linux as first-class platforms, and every pull request (and additions are all through pull requests) is tested on android. iOS coming soon.
I'm glad you mention Qt. Qt bindings are an absolute necessity before my company (which also makes cross-platform applications) could consider adopting Rust.
Yep, I think we are in complete agreement. My inference from looking at the language and community is that Rust absolutely intends to serve this use case.
