> the gatekeeping implied here [...] is really toxic
It's Theo de Raadt, toxic rhetoric is sort of his brand.
But... he has a real point here. It's not about grep or cat or whatever really, those are just the use cases for which OpenBSD would care.
It's that as Rust is reaching the second decade of its history, and despite some outrageous wins in press, evangelism, and general developer mindshare... Rust just hasn't made much progress in replacing exactly the software that it claims to be intended to replace!
Where are the pervasively used compression libraries in Rust? Video and audio codecs? Network stacks? Database engines? System management utilities? PKI and encryption stacks? All that stuff is still in C. After ten years of Rust success!
It's not like no one is using Rust. It's not like it doesn't have success stories (even in the categories above). But they're comparatively rare, still. There's nothing in Rust that rises to the category of "stuff everyone just uses because it's what everyone uses" (c.f. zlib, libjpeg, readline...) yet.
And if there isn't after the first decade, what needs to change to make it happen in the second. I mean, is it maybe fair to say that the window is closing for rust to take over a significant fraction the systems programming world?
It's Theo de Raadt, toxic rhetoric is sort of his brand.
But... he has a real point here. It's not about grep or cat or whatever really, those are just the use cases for which OpenBSD would care.
It's that as Rust is reaching the second decade of its history, and despite some outrageous wins in press, evangelism, and general developer mindshare... Rust just hasn't made much progress in replacing exactly the software that it claims to be intended to replace!
Where are the pervasively used compression libraries in Rust? Video and audio codecs? Network stacks? Database engines? System management utilities? PKI and encryption stacks? All that stuff is still in C. After ten years of Rust success!
It's not like no one is using Rust. It's not like it doesn't have success stories (even in the categories above). But they're comparatively rare, still. There's nothing in Rust that rises to the category of "stuff everyone just uses because it's what everyone uses" (c.f. zlib, libjpeg, readline...) yet.
And if there isn't after the first decade, what needs to change to make it happen in the second. I mean, is it maybe fair to say that the window is closing for rust to take over a significant fraction the systems programming world?