Rightly or wrongly, I'd like to see Gleam as a Go competitor for Web apps and CLI apps.
Unfortunately, easy cross-compilation to relatively static binaries is a "must" for me. Now that Go gives it to me, I won't really entertain a competitor that doesn't provide a "static build" option.
So I'm glad to see this exists, even though it looks pretty janky!
This is interesting to my on both a technical level as well as a social-political level. I wonder what impact "AI-washing" will have on licensing for example
Really good references to "crossing the chasm" between early adopter needs and mainstream needs. In addition to the Ubuntu coreutils use case, I wonder what other chasms Rust is attempting to cross. I know Rust for Linux (though I think that's still relegated to drivers?) and automotive (not sure where that is).
There are big pushes in pretty much every direction. The projects that really stand out to me are pyo3 (Replace c++ python modules with rust), Dioxus (react-like web framework), The ferrocine qualified compiler (automotive)
I think right now the ecosystem is pretty ripe and with DARPA TRACTOR there are only more and more reasons every day to put rust on your toolbelt.
I am secretly hoping that eventually we break free from the cycle of "hire a senior dev and he likes rust so the company switches" over to hey let's hire some good mid-level and junior rust developers
Are mid level and junior developers being hired anywhere for any reason right now? I don't mean specifically rust developers. I mean software developers.
Sure. There was an article a week or two ago about IBM aggressively hiring juniors. Of course the fact that is noteworthy probably means something in itself....
If you want to take a look at some of the "big drivers", the Project Goals[1] is the right place. These are goals proposed by the community and the language developers put together, they are not explicit milestones or must-haves, but they do serve as a guideline to what the project tries to put its time and effort on.
Rust is undoubtedly excellent. What tarnishes the picture is a small group of people that rewrite solid pieces of code into Rust, hijacking the original brand names (eg. "sudo") for the sole purpose of virtue signaling. And the later is why the come after the most stable pieces of software that warrant no rewrite at all, like coreutils.
It seems to me that the right approach would be to ignore those and still love Rust for what nice of a language it is.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu is all in on virtue signaling.
I try to do this in Go as well, but the amount of pointers used to represent optional fields (more generally the lack of algebraic types) is making it less effective/ more verbose than I'd like
Maybe? I feel like there's been lots of efforts to migrate large C++ codebases over the years, and few actually complete the migration. Heck, Google is even making Carbon to try to solve this.
migrating any large project is going to be billions of dollars worth of labor. Language isn't a large factor in that cost, you can save few tens of millions at most with a better language.
The large factor is the amount of work to create everything again. Plenty has been written about large re-writes, they can and have worked out in the long run, but generally it takes a decade for the new to be as good as the old - either it is missing critical features or it has too many bugs.
> From what I can tell they're pretty laser focused on making a browser
I agree with you. I also agree that this decision is an example of that.
SerenityOS had an "everything from scratch in one giant mono-repo" rule. It was, explicitly a hobby project and one rooted in enjoyment and 'idealism from the get go. It was founded by a man looking for something productive to focus on instead of drugs. It was therapy. Hence the name.
Ladybird, as an independent project, was founded with the goal of being the only truly independent web browser (independent from corporate control generally and Google specifically).
They have been very focussed on that, have not had any sacred cows, and have shed A LOT of the home-grown infrastructure they inherited from being part of SerenityOS. Sometimes that saddens me a little but there is no denying that it has sped them up.
Their progress has been incredible. This comment is being written in Ladybird. I have managed GitHub projects in Ladybird. I have sent Gmail messages in Ladybird. It is not "ready" but it blows my mind how close it is.
I think Ladybid will be a "usable" browser before we enter 2027. That is just plain amazing.
Yeah, Serenityos was build everything from scratch for fun. Ladybird is build where an alternative implementation is going to add value. No need to get sidetracked reinventing SSL or ffmpeg.
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