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A new look for rust-lang.org

blog.rust-lang.org

111–116 of 116 posts

Re: A new look for rust-lang.org

#111
post #41
post #38

I actually like the new website. I think the primary barrier to Rust adoption now is something along the lines of "my organization doesn't use it"—this website is clearly geared toward persuading CTOs or administrators. It's a sign of the strength of the Rust community that they feel they no longer need to persuade developers. It implies that many developers have already heard about and are interested in Rust, but ne…

Well said. As a programmer I prefer the old site, however you bring up a good point. The new site is a lot better for people in management to see that Rust is used by other large companies and to not immediately discredit it.

Then why not make two sites?

management.rust-lang.org and rust-lang.org

Re: A new look for rust-lang.org

#112

I'm CEO of WSO2 and we are working on a programming language for writing microservices called 'Ballerina', and we host it's community at http://ballerina.io . Prior to the first public launch, I pulled 9 of our core community members into an offsite where we developed and implemented the web site. It was a challenging exercise and so can relate to Rust's community efforts to the redesign. I wanted to offer some persp…

It's pretty clear that they are pivoting their messaging to go after a wider developer base. I just don't understand why they did it in the way that they did. Rust already has a huge value proposition for any company that wants to use it in the form of hard memory safety. Just look at the number of high profile memory leak related problems in the last 5 years adding up to 100's of millions of dollars in damages. Billions if you count flow down effects. Companies care about cash and risk, managers care about not being the one who signed off on the next Heartbleed. Forced memory safety also means that you don't have to worry as much about junior developers making the errors that lead to those catastrophic problems and allow you to lower your hiring costs (sorta, think like a manager) and have less time spent by your senior developers checking for those often very hard to find problems.

What I really think Rust needs to grab a wide audience is an out of the box just works IDE. Also too many libraries require nightly, which is a nightmare for a business that must have stable code for deployment.

Edit: They previous had their value proposition as their slogan. It needed work for directing, i.e. don't talk about what Rust does, talk about what Rust does for you. They took it out and replaced it with a mostly meaningless catchphrase. That doesn't actually address the problem with their old slogan.

The most damning thing about the redesign is where did the link to the documentation go? All the most important stuff for people actually using the language got buried.

Re: A new look for rust-lang.org

#114
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree. The list of features on the old list is very meaningful to a C programmer who will recognize all of those things as things would love to use every day. Its underlying message is "we're technical nerds and we made a thing that you'll like". The new version is corporate-speak that won't appeal to.. anyone? Its underlying message is "we're trying to get you to like us and we studied how to do this". Bu…

I totally agree. As a coder, whenever I visit a website of a project I'm interested in, I'm looking for key technical features to convince me it's the right tool for the job, or that it offers an unique property tht I never even thought about. That's usually conveyed in a list of bullet points, and a couple of examples. I can rarely find it though. I wasn't quite able to grasp why, and I kind of accepted this as how…

Whatever Docker is, it's Windows-only. Apparently.

Re: A new look for rust-lang.org

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, systems programming is about so much more than being good a programming in a particular language. Programming in rust doesn't make you understand memory barriers.

> Programming in rust doesn't make you understand memory barriers. I'm not a fan of the new website, but it's possible that the intent was to be "with Rust, you don't have to".

I guess it depends on what you mean by systems programming. You absolutely need to understand memory barriers if you are doing operating systems work; no language can spare you from that.
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