Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?

With that being said fast compilation times are amazing and must be a default in new languages. If not they should follow an approach like Dart where there is a VM for development and also a AOT compilation support for producing binaries.

Deliberately inflammatory, and also false.

1. Rust has limited abstraction features to make it more approachable and implementable, but make it unable to express libraries that are easy in C++. This will not change soon, although Rust will accrete features at a steady rate. But the gap in feature sets will widen, not narrow with time.

2. The total number of people using Rust in production is easily less than the number who pick up C++ in any given week. It will be ten years before Rust is a mature industrial language, if it gets there. (It has made a good start in that direction, which is better than can be said for any other newish language.)

3. C++ and Rust will coexist for decades. The most ambitious work will continue to be done in C++, while Rust will be more than adequate for what might otherwise have been done in (the much less capable) C, Go, or Java.

4. D fizzled because it is too similar to C++, and therefore unnecessary. Rust found a ready audience in people intimidated by C++, frustrated with the limitations of C, Java, and Go, and ready to try something wholly new. Its designers have threaded the gap deftly, uniquely adopting C++'s greatest strength, the destructor (which it calls the "Drop trait"), and avoided weighing it down with garbage-collection. It has a bright future if it can multiply its adoption rate by two orders of magnitude.

As Stroustrup said, there are only two kinds of language: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses.

With enough luck, by the time Rust is mature, it will have gained plenty to complain about. Rust will have got somewhere when you read more complaints about it than brags about having made it do something already done in a mature language.

2. True, but growth curves are rarely linear. Here’s a rough proxy on users - the number of subscribers to /r/rust - https://subredditstats.com/r/Rust. Look at the growth between 2014-18 and 2018-2020. You’re extrapolating on current growth rate, but that may increase in future.

3. “Ambitious”. Nothing I’ve seen precludes using Rust for ambitious projects. In fact, seeing the experience of Dropbox, Mozilla, Facebook and others, there are some ambitious projects that could only have been done in Rust. I’m gonna say [citation needed].

I agree with Stroustrup and look forward to the day people complain about Rust :)

https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in...

Basically D just needs that big break to actually get things done. There are some absolutely brilliant people working on D but there's only so much sweat people will donate (some people are paid but I imagine rust probably has upwards of a hundred full time staff given that Mozilla and Microsoft use it in an official capacity)