> Rust is a cool language and I hope it eventually settles down enough to be considered for "real" projects.
I keep seeing folks with this "when will Rust be ready" sentiment and it feels a bit dated to me at this point.
At my last job we built machine control software for farm equipment (embedded Linux, call it firmware if you like). The kind of thing that would have been in C or C++ not long ago. Worked great, Rust itself was never the issue. Code from the very first versions continued to work with no problems over years of feature additions, bugfixes, rewriting, edition upgrades, etc.
The job before that, my team wrote a large library of 3D geometry analysis algorithms code that powered some fun and novel CAD manufacturing tools. In Rust. Worked great. It was fast enough, and crucially, we could run it against user-provided data without feeling like we were going to get owned by some buffer overrun. 10 years earlier it 100% would have been in C or C++ and I would have been terrified to throw externally generated user data at it. We were able to do what we needed to do and it served real paying users. What more do you need?
Rust is everywhere. It's in the browser. It's in databases. It's in container/VM runtimes. It's in networking code. It's in firmware. It's in the OS. It's in application code. It's in cryptography. It's in Android. Rust is all over the place.
The only other thing I can think of with a similar combined breadth and depth of deployment to Rust on "real" projects (other than C/C++) is Java.
If I needed something to both work and be maintainable by somebody in 2055, Rust is one of the few things I'd bother to put on the list, alongside C, C++, Java, Python, and Javascript.
I've been writing Rust professionally and personally since at least 2018 and this has never happened to me.
There are plenty of real criticisms one can make about Rust (I've made and will continue to make plenty) but I think your argument would be more compelling if you updated your experience with the present-day Rust toolchain. The Rust project takes stability very seriously.
I keep seeing folks with this "when will Rust be ready" sentiment and it feels a bit dated to me at this point.
At my last job we built machine control software for farm equipment (embedded Linux, call it firmware if you like). The kind of thing that would have been in C or C++ not long ago. Worked great, Rust itself was never the issue. Code from the very first versions continued to work with no problems over years of feature additions, bugfixes, rewriting, edition upgrades, etc.
The job before that, my team wrote a large library of 3D geometry analysis algorithms code that powered some fun and novel CAD manufacturing tools. In Rust. Worked great. It was fast enough, and crucially, we could run it against user-provided data without feeling like we were going to get owned by some buffer overrun. 10 years earlier it 100% would have been in C or C++ and I would have been terrified to throw externally generated user data at it. We were able to do what we needed to do and it served real paying users. What more do you need?
Rust is everywhere. It's in the browser. It's in databases. It's in container/VM runtimes. It's in networking code. It's in firmware. It's in the OS. It's in application code. It's in cryptography. It's in Android. Rust is all over the place.
The only other thing I can think of with a similar combined breadth and depth of deployment to Rust on "real" projects (other than C/C++) is Java.
If I needed something to both work and be maintainable by somebody in 2055, Rust is one of the few things I'd bother to put on the list, alongside C, C++, Java, Python, and Javascript.