> IMO it would be great to get folks who write the enormous base of existing realtime apps driving critical devices everywhere to sit up and take notice of Rust.
It would, and definitely should, move into the direction of safer languages than C.
The biggest problem I see is tooling and legacy. Tooling, because there's a ginormous amount of testing and design software that "works with C" (whatever that means in the context of the tool). Legacy, because everyone already has their 20 year old codebases and it's just not convenient to start focusing on two languages and switching the old code to Rust is just plain impossible economically.
Third problem is compiler. LLVM (rustc is a frontend to it, no?) is really good choice, but gcc has enormous advantage in supporting so many small platforms and it's very significant in this area of SW dev.
On the plus side, I've really gotten the impression that the Rust folks are truly trying to make adoption as smooth as possible. If that works, and Rust proves to be much better than C for these kinds of systems, I'd guess adopting Rust rather than not would start looking economically viable to companies. I mean, in the end that's what matters to them the most, and it's not easy to replace all you C ninjas with competent Rust writer.
It would, and definitely should, move into the direction of safer languages than C.
The biggest problem I see is tooling and legacy. Tooling, because there's a ginormous amount of testing and design software that "works with C" (whatever that means in the context of the tool). Legacy, because everyone already has their 20 year old codebases and it's just not convenient to start focusing on two languages and switching the old code to Rust is just plain impossible economically.
Third problem is compiler. LLVM (rustc is a frontend to it, no?) is really good choice, but gcc has enormous advantage in supporting so many small platforms and it's very significant in this area of SW dev.
On the plus side, I've really gotten the impression that the Rust folks are truly trying to make adoption as smooth as possible. If that works, and Rust proves to be much better than C for these kinds of systems, I'd guess adopting Rust rather than not would start looking economically viable to companies. I mean, in the end that's what matters to them the most, and it's not easy to replace all you C ninjas with competent Rust writer.