Personally while I'm somewhat pragmatic about Rust, I do have to admit it fills a niche that no other language does currently: that of a high-performance, zero runtime memory-safe language.
By memory-safety I mean the basic 'no crashes and corruption' version, that's fulfilled by Java, Go etc., but not by C++ and Zig.
I'm a C++ dev among other things, and I have enough experience to know, you really can't hand C++ to a novice dev (even one who uses smart pointers correctly), and expect an app with no memory related crashes/issues.
For this reason only, I generally thing C/C++/Zig is a language for typical professional projects/applications (which are written usually in GC languages nowadays).
I think it's a hard cutoff criteria. Most programmers/orgs simply cannot work with memory unsafe software. Most commerical C++ codebases leak.
This is basically the most important and common 'niche' of SW dev, which for some reason has been somewhat neglected, and I don't really consider Rust a great fit here either, but it doesn't lack anything that would disqualify it.
Swift would be another good choice, but it seems that language is very tied to the Apple ecosystem.
The only (non-Apple) language that understood EXACTLY what these people wanted imo was Object Pascal/Delphi in the 90s to early 2000s but seem to have died out unfortunately.
I started my career with turbo pascal, then Delphi… great language, great tooling. Tbh everything since then felt like a huge step back, especially for UI.
Absolutely my feeling as well. I'll never understand why more activity and innovation didn't coalesce around object pascal...save for FreePascal and Lazarus which are terrific.
My love for Pascal makes me appreciate very much the scripting in InnoSetup. The software itself is amazing, but the scripting gives it great versatility.
torginus · · focus · HN ↗
By memory-safety I mean the basic 'no crashes and corruption' version, that's fulfilled by Java, Go etc., but not by C++ and Zig.
I'm a C++ dev among other things, and I have enough experience to know, you really can't hand C++ to a novice dev (even one who uses smart pointers correctly), and expect an app with no memory related crashes/issues.
For this reason only, I generally thing C/C++/Zig is a language for typical professional projects/applications (which are written usually in GC languages nowadays).
I think it's a hard cutoff criteria. Most programmers/orgs simply cannot work with memory unsafe software. Most commerical C++ codebases leak.
This is basically the most important and common 'niche' of SW dev, which for some reason has been somewhat neglected, and I don't really consider Rust a great fit here either, but it doesn't lack anything that would disqualify it.
Swift would be another good choice, but it seems that language is very tied to the Apple ecosystem.
The only (non-Apple) language that understood EXACTLY what these people wanted imo was Object Pascal/Delphi in the 90s to early 2000s but seem to have died out unfortunately.
strideashort · · focus · HN ↗
smallmouth · · focus · HN ↗
richie_adler · · focus · HN ↗