Rust is mostly safety

:) Let me put it this way: if for some reason Rust ever takes a serious market share from Java (or other similar languages) in the enterprise space, I will surely be well into my retirement by then, so my interest isn't financial. I was a C++ developer for many years, working on very large soft (and some hard) realtime systems, and I was a Java holdout, but once most of the defense industry switched, virtually nobody (including us) ever complained about a performance decrease. So even if the claim that GCs adversely affect performance in large, complex programs (where RAM overhead isn't an issue) were true, the number of organizations that build software of that kind and where this performance would matter more than in defense, is very, very small (not to mention that most of the current performance deficiencies in Java are not related to GC). If that's the kind of user that would be a significant portion of Rust's userbase, then Rust is in trouble. Companies that sell ultra-low latency GCs for a fraction of the cost it would take for enterprise shops to adopt a language like Rust, are, well not exactly on their way to the Fortune 500. The systems software space -- drivers, kernels, filesystems, and the entire embedded space -- is at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude bigger.

I think this quote points to the REAL underlying issue here.

Rust is a language primarily built for systems programming. It has many strengths to celebrate, and brings curated best practices as well as its own novel features to systems programming.

However, most programmers in 2016 aren't "systems programmers" anymore. At the very least, most programmers who actively talk-up new technologies on web forums are not systems programmers. The majority (or at least the majority of the vocal and socially engaged) are web developers, mobile developers, CRUD apps and microservices, etc.

As interesting as Rust may be in the systems space, it doesn't bring much compelling new hype to the table for web stuff.

You have yet-another-concurrency-approach? That's great, but most web developers rely on an app server or low-level library for that, and seldom have to think about concurrency up at the level of their own code.

You have an approach for memory safety without a garbage collector? That's great, but most web developers have never even had to think much about garbage collection. Java, Go, etc... the garbage collection performance of all these languages is on a level that makes this a moot point 99.999% of the time.

You have a seamless FFI for integrating with C code? That's great, but after 20 years of web development I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a project do this. And those examples were Perl-based CGI apps way back in the day.

Rust people seem almost dumbfounded that everyone hasn't jumped all over their language yet. And from a systems programmer perspective, memory safety without garbage collection does sound amazing. But you guys really need to understand that Hacker News and Reddit hype is driven by web developers, and that community isn't even sure whether or not type safety is a worthwhile feature! So really, it's amazing that you've managed to draw as much hype as you have. It's not about the mainstream popularity of your language, it's about the mainstream popularity of your field.

> The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.

"Facilitate the growth" does not imply that dominance of a certain practice (whether that is use of Python, or adoption of its core principals) is a goal. So you have an incentive for the PSF to say "our international community is growing at a sufficient rate" and focus instead on "advancing the language," which may or may not be aligned with adoption. In such a framework, it becomes easy to justify backwards-incompatible major releases that, regardless of whether their opinion is justified, many users consider to be user-hostile. Framing Rust towards a larger mission that implies user adoption of core principals as a fundamental goal seems much cleaner in that regard, and could conceivably avoid similar pitfalls.