Is it a coincidence that all these quality life things start to pop up after C++ is facing real competition for the first time? Seems a bit odd to add print after using std::out for 30 years.
Nerd alt-history story: What if Graydon decides he should attend WG21 and so instead of Rust what we get is a decade of attempts to fix C++ and reform the process, followed by burn out?
Then we'd be supporting a different language that shares the same or similar ideals as Rust. Whether that's something already in existence or something entirely new.
Rust isn't really that unique, there are plenty of other safe languages out there. And if Graydon was alone in wanting something like Rust then Rust wouldn't have grown in popularity like it has.
Rust exists because enough people thought there was a need for Rust to exist. So if that wasn't Graydon with Rust, then it would have been someone else with something else.
This isn't meant to take anything away from Graydon nor Rust. Just saying that innovations seldom happen in silos. They're usually a result of teams of people lusting for change.
I think rust was helped by being part of Mozilla and really helped when they got experienced devs (guys who made ruby Bundler) to build the Cargo package manager pre 1.0
And helped a bit when they took a lot of stuff out the stdlib into packages for the new package manager.
And helped a lot with a heavy focus pretty early on great compiler messages (inspired by elm) and with a focus on tools and documentation more generally.
Like a lot of things in life, rust was in the right place at the right time to get popular. I do think the deep want for something better and safer then c++ helped but they made a lot of good choices(not necessarily the best choices but good enough choices) and had some money backing them. I think it was far from inevitable that some other language to compete with c++ would have come out anytime soon if rust hadn't been around (and hadn't made good enough choices). It might have happened but decent chances it wouldn't have.
> I think rust was helped by being part of Mozilla and really helped when they got experienced devs (guys who made ruby Bundler) to build the Cargo package manager pre 1.0
That's one of the reasons Rust became as widespread as it is now. However we are talking about a "what if Rust never existed" scenario. I'm confident that kind of scenario we'd be talking about a different-yet-similar language, maybe one that never got invented in our version of reality, as having the same or similar forces that helped that hypothetical language.
My point is that people wanted a successor to C++. So it was going to happen. In our reality it was Rust. But if Rust wasn't created by Greydon then someone else would have created something else to fill that void.
> I think it was far from inevitable that some other language to compete with c++ would have come out anytime soon if rust hadn't been around (and hadn't made good enough choices). It might have happened but decent chances it wouldn't have.
I very much disagree with this assumption. We have D, ObjectiveC, C#, Zig, Go, OCaml and others born out of the need to to iterate and improve on what came before it. But nothing had really caught on in the domain of safety + zero-cost abstractions principle. And particularly not aimed at C++ devs. It's been a contentious point for years -- a void people have been looking to fill. So it was only a matter of time before something caught on.
But this is all hypothetical. Plus if you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then arguably we're both right :D
Rust was helped by being a Mozilla language, and some of the personalities it had around it.
The big plus of the language was proving that Cyclone ideas to improve C, from AT&T research project were sound and could be made mainstream.
And now other languages are building on it as well, that is why Swift, Chapel, Haskell, OCaml, D are also having a go at a mix of linear types, affine types and effects.
However many folks credit Rust for type system features that are actually available in any ML derived language, or Ada/SPARK, so it isn't as if knowledge is that well spread.
> Rust was helped by being a Mozilla language, and some of the personalities it had around it.
Indeed. But my point is there was already widespread movement behind building a programming language. So if Mozilla hadn’t taken charge then I’m certain someone will.
My point is that Rust was born from a wider desire for change rather than that desire existing because of Rust. Thus that desire would have been met in one form or another regardless of the invention of Rust.
