My experience with Rust codebases has been different from the Author's. I think his or her points about why Rust
should encourage high quality programs makes sense. In practice, most of the Rust OSS I find is poor quality, ie the article's lament of "today's software quality crisis – crashes, bloat and more." I'm suspicious my observations are because I'm viewing select slice of Rust code; perhaps the higher quality code examples aren't OSS, so I haven't seen them.
Examples:
- Rust is well-suited to Embedded. There are a handful of high-quality tools (eg probe-run, defmt, SVD2Rust etc). Most of the higher level libraries, and the chat on Rust embedded communication channels are a mess. Dependency hell, poor APIs, hardware support that's been designed to make trivial examples and never tested on practical firmware etc.
- Backend web dev - Several Flask analogs, but nothing that makes sense to use for a web page. Internally, dependency hell, and filled with generics and Async.
- Graphics programming - Churn, and low-quality results compared to C libraries eg for Vulkan. Fine if you use the libraries that are thin wrappers on the C APIs, but ones that try to apply a Safe or Rusty API are lower quality.
I don't mean this as a disagreement to the article - Rust gives developers tools to make high quality software! The Rust project itself is superb. I'm surprised that his predictions don't match with what we have. (yet)
Examples:
- Rust is well-suited to Embedded. There are a handful of high-quality tools (eg probe-run, defmt, SVD2Rust etc). Most of the higher level libraries, and the chat on Rust embedded communication channels are a mess. Dependency hell, poor APIs, hardware support that's been designed to make trivial examples and never tested on practical firmware etc.
- Backend web dev - Several Flask analogs, but nothing that makes sense to use for a web page. Internally, dependency hell, and filled with generics and Async.
- Graphics programming - Churn, and low-quality results compared to C libraries eg for Vulkan. Fine if you use the libraries that are thin wrappers on the C APIs, but ones that try to apply a Safe or Rusty API are lower quality.
I don't mean this as a disagreement to the article - Rust gives developers tools to make high quality software! The Rust project itself is superb. I'm surprised that his predictions don't match with what we have. (yet)