> Python is incredibly popular because its runtime performance is "good enough" for a huge fraction of application
> But Rust will never "eat the world" of general applications (that is, the overwhelming majority of applications), because Python is good enough across all axes for these applications. It would be engineering malpractice for most companies to rewrite working Python applications in Rust. That was not the case for C-to-Python (or even PHP-to-Python) rewrites.
I dunno, I sort of hope that there'll be good and resource-light application development frameworks in Rust that do "eat the world." I spent most of a summer two years back using an (at that point) 12-year-old machine without X for both my personal and work computing. I did browsing with w3m+imlib2, images and PDFs with fbi and fbpdf (iirc), and fbterm (and tmux) as a terminal emulator. That was leagues more responsive than the firefox/eog/zathura/konsole setup I reverted to once the school year started (and I needed to run webapps again).
If you're familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law I think it applies really strongly to this case, and it's gotten remarkably worse as programmers have switched to making general applications with Python and Electron at the same time as single-threaded clock speeds have slowed down.
> But Rust will never "eat the world" of general applications (that is, the overwhelming majority of applications), because Python is good enough across all axes for these applications. It would be engineering malpractice for most companies to rewrite working Python applications in Rust. That was not the case for C-to-Python (or even PHP-to-Python) rewrites.
I dunno, I sort of hope that there'll be good and resource-light application development frameworks in Rust that do "eat the world." I spent most of a summer two years back using an (at that point) 12-year-old machine without X for both my personal and work computing. I did browsing with w3m+imlib2, images and PDFs with fbi and fbpdf (iirc), and fbterm (and tmux) as a terminal emulator. That was leagues more responsive than the firefox/eog/zathura/konsole setup I reverted to once the school year started (and I needed to run webapps again).
If you're familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law I think it applies really strongly to this case, and it's gotten remarkably worse as programmers have switched to making general applications with Python and Electron at the same time as single-threaded clock speeds have slowed down.