Triplett explaining why Rust is so loved by the people who use it. He cites browser teams who said they wouldn't have dared write complex threading or SIMD code in C, but did it in Rust and it worked first time.
Right.
Why do you think it's sort of the most loved language for people who use it?
So I think there's a few things that come into play there. One is that aspect of once you've gotten used to it, it feels very comforting and protective in terms of look at all these things it's catching for me that I don't have to worry about. It provides a kind of psychological safety where it's like, I am free to experiment. I am free to do complicated things. There was years ago a bunch of work out of Mozilla's browser team and other teams have reflected the same thing where they effectively said, we would not have felt comfortable writing this in C, where like you see people in Rust. Just saying, I'm going to go write a bunch of fancy SIMD code. I'm going to go write really complicated threading code. And it just works. And it just works on the first try, where people were afraid to build that, not because they didn't think they could do it, but because they anticipated all the pain that would come up when they're debugging it. And so it makes people feel fearless because they feel well protected.…
Right. The compile time failure means that you're not going to get something that slips through secretly haunting you for years, right?
Exactly. And there's a few other aspects of it as well that I think keep people coming back. One is that we are the whole industry is improving in this direction, but Rust has been particularly welcoming and inclusive towards people. And that reputation kind of radiates outward and set the tone of…
So, what is the most surprising thing you've seen people write in Rust?
