The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.
If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.
But why the rust? there are quite a large variety of languages with memory protection (for example Java), and freely compiled (for example golang), but for some reason they persistently try to rewrite the whole “world” into rust. I’m not against rust, I’m really curious.
This is why its generally better to only write new code in more memory safe langs instead of rewriting everything
The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.
If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.
But why the rust? there are quite a large variety of languages with memory protection (for example Java), and freely compiled (for example golang), but for some reason they persistently try to rewrite the whole “world” into rust. I’m not against rust, I’m really curious.
Many things do use go, the issue with Java lies in its massive runtime burden (also not a great language IMO)
Java isn’t an exciting language, sure.
Kotlin is, though.