Rant after trying Rust a bit

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 23 July 2015 at 16:46:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> Dicebot:
>  D has done many things wrong, but there is one right thing that
>> totally outshines it all - it is cost-effective and 
>> pragmatical tool for a very wide scope of applications.
>
> would you care to write more on this as a blog post, making it 
> vivid and setting out some examples?  that's my tentative 
> judgement too, and why I am here, but I lean very heavily on my 
> intuition and that's not enough to persuade other people when I 
> don't yet have mastery of the relevant domain knowledge, having 
> returned to programming quite recently.  I am talking to 
> another decent-sized hf that might be open to exploring the use 
> of D, but the more vivid people are able to make the case the 
> better.

AFAIR Don had quite a good summary at DConf 2013 
(http://dconf.org/2013/talks/clugston.html) for how it applies to 
our business. I guess that presentation can still be used as 
selling point.

I like to put it this way : only very few of Sociomantic 
developers knew at least something about D before joining the 
company. It were mostly C++/Java/Whatever developers which 
learned everything on spot. We haven't even had any special 
training courses - just giving one book (Learn Tango with D) and 
few weeks of time to experiment was usually enough to start 
righting some production code, learning more advanced stuff later 
on per-need basis from reviewer comments.

Considering growing deficit of skilled programmers in the 
industry in general being able to kickstart into new language 
like that is a very big deal for business. C style syntax brings 
familiarity and being able to write working apps with simple 
concepts only (even if they are un-idiomatic in "modern D") 
greatly improves learning curve.

No matter how many effort is put into tooling or documentation, I 
simply can't see Rust ever being used like that. Well, unless it 
gets studied commonly as part of computer science BSc and most 
new devs will be at least faimilar with it. Writing simple number 
guessing app (like one presented in Rust book) can easily take 
half an hour for even experienced (but new to Rust) developer - 
it simply won't compile until you get every single smallest bit 
_right_. In small to medium business you simply can't afford 
investments like that.

I see Rust as possible language of choice for a very small (but 
important) subset of applications of big enough size that 
maintenance costs are much greater than development costs AND 
both performance and safety matter. AAA games, life-critical 
real-time software, software monsters like your next Firefox or 
Photoshop. That is big enough share of market in terms of money 
for language to keep being demanded but it is tiny minority of 
applications in terms of pure project count. It is clearly not 
your average next project.