“Since we began our journey with Rust, the number of projects using Rust inside Meta has increased at an accelerated rate” That almost sounds like an endorsement. I’ve been holding off learning Rust. However, it seems like Rust adoption is reaching a tipping point.
Yep, and its pretty much going to become the next C++ - i.e widely adopted at first, and driven into a shit state. Specifically because of this https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html This needs to exist in Rust for it to get adopted, because forcing good developers to get explicit with code for memory safety when they are doing simple operations is going to result in them ignoring the language. So ev…
> [Rust] [will be] driven into a shit state. Specifically because of [unsafe Rust]
Using unsafe Rust is actually frowned upon in the Rust community, unless you specifically need it in order to interface with another programming language (e.g., Foreign Function Interface), work around some OS issue (e.g., memory pinning for Linux driver development) and so on. Otherwise, you are supposed to always write safe Rust code.
Way more than unsafe Rust, what worries me is the potential future, long-term language feature bloat. I wholeheartedly do hope that Rust core team will keep the language as simple and consistent as humanly possible.
> If you want to improve development, focus on smarter compilers/interpreters, not languages.
Well, in order to get a smarter compiler, you need new language features to be able to feed additional information about programmer's intent into that compiler - hence Rust's new language features, for example (memory reference) lifetime annotations that all newcomers have a problem with :).