Because there's a movement called "Rewrite everything in Rust"
If that is indeed the answer (and I don’t think it is), perhaps try to answer the question “why isn’t there a similar movement for D?”
Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
41–50 of 262 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#42No body has your shit arron
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#43No body has your shit arron
You better not come in with a smart asa mouth to nobody and I'm not playing games
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#44Engineers learn languages because of success stories by other companies—not by the merits of the syntax or one-off tricks like compiling itself in 5 seconds. The fact that Firefox uses Rust for the browser engine or that Dropbox uses Rust for the sync engine is the kind of thing that gets me interested.
Corporate sponsorship is the new prereq for a successful language/framework in today's world. It didn't used to be that way but it is now. Bring on our new googlemozillaapplefacebookmicrosoft language/framework overlords.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#45Personally, at some point Rust was just clearly better and after a while - I lost interest in D. I don't have time to keep track of D catching up, when I'm so happy with Rust, and ecosystem is growing so fast. Maybe D got much better in last few years... but I kind of don't care anymore. It's hard enough to introduce a raising star like Rust to your coworkers and D just don't have traction anymore. I've been followin…
I’m currently trying to get into robotics. But why does everyone want c++? Surely robots can be programmed in other languages.
A language is more than just a technology: it's an ecosystem of libraries, platform APIs, developer mindshare and experience, familiarity, legacy codebases, product support. Don't discount the weight of all of those auxiliary, human factors.
Rust, culturally, comes from the web. That's why it has the most traction in the web server/WASM space for now. It's starting to poke its head into Systems use-cases because of the sheer weight of its memory safety benefits there. Maybe in a few years it'll get some real use in the games industry (real industry; not just enthusiasts), though Unreal remains a bastion of C++ that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But then there are some dark corners of C/C++'s territory that move even more slowly, and where the cultural shift will take a long time. I think to a great extent, embedded falls into that category.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did go took off then?
It's impossible to measure how much impact just having Rob Pike and Google behind Go has had on its adoption.
Google and Pike get you in the door. Goroutines get you to sit down. The onboarding-oriented nature of the language and ecosystem convince you to sign.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#47Engineers learn languages because of success stories by other companies—not by the merits of the syntax or one-off tricks like compiling itself in 5 seconds. The fact that Firefox uses Rust for the browser engine or that Dropbox uses Rust for the sync engine is the kind of thing that gets me interested.
I've never heard of a commercial success built off the back of Racket or J but happily went through a book on Racket and would love to do the same for J.
And yet almost nobody uses Racket and J. I think they were talking about more wide-spread use.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#48Engineers learn languages because of success stories by other companies—not by the merits of the syntax or one-off tricks like compiling itself in 5 seconds. The fact that Firefox uses Rust for the browser engine or that Dropbox uses Rust for the sync engine is the kind of thing that gets me interested.
That's a dangerously general statement, and it does not apply to me (an engineer) for example. I learned a lot of languages because of the language itself, e.g. their type system.
It may be dangerous to blindly trust that a language is good based on a company's success with that language, but a large company deciding to heavily invest resources and take a risk on a language is also evidence that the language has the designs to succeed.