Will Crichton

When both @ahl and @bcantrill are singing the praises of Rust, you wonder if all our other languages should just shut down and go home. I'm reminded of @paulg's "Java's Cover" in reverse.https://twitter.com/ahl/status/1244678124505149445 …

What's your take on Rust, Shriram? I feel like like of a dummy when it comes to PL, but I think it's beautiful and pulls a lot of great ideas from places like ML. Really satisfying to build in, and then the ecosystem is great.

It's awesome! Doesn't at all surprise me that you rock stars are finding it good. It's like C done right by people with humility and and understanding of the weaknesses of humans, while still keeping what really matters about C. »

There are certainly some issues around the edges (people find borrows tricky to learn; some things are hard to write because the language maybe gets in the way too much, so it can't entirely replace C; libraries are still being built). »

But for decades we've wondered "What could be a better C", and there were several cool academic projects (like Cyclone), but none quite clicked. Rust brought it all together and engineered the heck out of it to make it useful. I'd call it an industry-academia win-win. »

A few years old now, but Alex Light did a senior honors reimplementing the 169 OS in Rust, and wrote up some of his observations. Not sure how current, but I found it really useful then. The thing that most surprised me was his trouble with allocation. http://cs.brown.edu/research/pubs/theses/ugrad/2015/light.alex.pdf …