Because there's a movement called "Rewrite everything in Rust"
Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
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Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#12I know most people won't like this answer but the reason why rust is more popular now is because it had klabnik-san, mozilla, cargo and the super excited community.
The same goes for go-lang. It throws away years of research into programming languages. While rust is a great language and deserve the popularity, do you think go would have peaked in popularity if there weren't rob-pike-san and google behind it.
It's not a matter of features for programming languages popularity. It's who is backing them and doing the work to unite the community.
Programming communities also need to be aggressively cultish to take off in the beginning. You must be able to bite everyone's same repeated rehashed argument about lacking ecosystem, bad tooling and so on. You must be able to survive that and still shill the language.
It's reality. Everyone will tell you I don't care about your language when I can use my favourite language. People have invested more money than one can imagine into fixing php, js etc.
You can't easily get someone to switch from their single threaded language when they can scale it through AWS lambdas or other layers of abstractions.
This is why you don't see wide use of ML. All those communities are passive. They write their tutorials and papers in pure html on a weird forgettable domain name. They don't tell people to use the language because they are conscious of the lacking ecosystem but how would you get a good ecosystem without someone adopting it? OSS doesn't pay enough. Tooling require money. They don't focus on marketing or sponsorship.
Same applies for dlang.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#13Engineers 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.
Are you implying that D is slow at compiling regular code but fast at compiling itself, because of some cleverness?
Is that actually true?
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#14Engineers 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.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#15D was closed source when it was in the spotlight and missed its opportunity to gain mind share.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#16Because Rust is new and shiny. People who use Rust aren't using it to solve real world problems, they're using it to scratch a novelty itch. D is a tragedy in my opinion. It's an excellent language that just doesn't fit the political needs of any of the big players. We have Swift which is a worse version of C#, we have Go, we have Java. Why don't we have a single language so that we can do cross platform development…
So your solution for there being to many languages is for somebody to create one more. And the main thing you want from that language is that it have no corporate sponsorship, such that whoever creates it will have to bear the financial burden personally.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#17d does not support ownership and borrowing “just like rust”
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#18Engineers 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.
Perhaps. But general as it is this explains what OP was asking: Why Rust is more popular when D has the same functionality.
There's always people that are fascinated by new languages but I feel this is likely a minority. I think people want to learn languages they know will be useful.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#19Because Rust is new and shiny. People who use Rust aren't using it to solve real world problems, they're using it to scratch a novelty itch. D is a tragedy in my opinion. It's an excellent language that just doesn't fit the political needs of any of the big players. We have Swift which is a worse version of C#, we have Go, we have Java. Why don't we have a single language so that we can do cross platform development…
> Why don't we have a single language so that we can do cross platform development and abandon web browsers and javascript?
What does that even mean? What do you lack in regards to cross-platform from Java / Rust / Nim / Go / Python / Ruby / Haxe / ...? (I'm assuming cross-platform here means desktops, not microprocessors)
Specifically, yes, there are things that you may miss in every one of them, but it's not like we don't have the option to use them. What's the point in complete unification in the first place?
Re: Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?
#20Because Rust is new and shiny. People who use Rust aren't using it to solve real world problems, they're using it to scratch a novelty itch. D is a tragedy in my opinion. It's an excellent language that just doesn't fit the political needs of any of the big players. We have Swift which is a worse version of C#, we have Go, we have Java. Why don't we have a single language so that we can do cross platform development…
So your solution for there being to many languages is for somebody to create one more. And the main thing you want from that language is that it have no corporate sponsorship, such that whoever creates it will have to bear the financial burden personally.
Look no further than Clojure to see that it can be done. And I offer that as a 100% neutral statement.