this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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For me it is the language it's written in: Rust. Now I can participate, fix bugs and implement new apps with the language I know the best.
Some people might also say less crashes, less vulnerabilities and all that, but for me the first part is the most important.
Qt and gtk both have rust bindings though?
Yep, but QT's object model and its being written in C++ makes it super cumbersome to use in Rust. GTK is better here due to it being written in C, but the direction it's taking in GTK4 is not really great, and having a safe Rust UI toolkit is a huge win for the community.
Cosmic being fully Rust means I can just take one project from them, and immediately start working on it with cargo and all the familiar tools. It's not as easy with C or C++ projects in Gnome and KDE.
I think it's great we have some competition in this space, everybody wins.
I think this rust only thing is gonna screw them on the long term. You really don't want that for app development, it might be a good choice for low level stuff and security sensitive things like browsers; but other than that you're severely hampering your contribution sources and increasing the development time. Color me skeptic but I see this going the same way unity did.
More than C or C++? I've been working on very effective and performing Rust teams professionally now about a decade and I tend to disagree.
The problems come when you don't support anything other than rust. Higher level languages are better suited for trivial applications. Rust isn't exactly a very popular language either so you're not going to attract contributions from random Joe #3. Cosmic's best hope is to attract the attention of the big players and get enterprise support, because random users just don't give a shit about the security upsides of Rust and will judge the DE solely based on its looks and features.
This is a weird take. Rust is very popular and is the current heir apparent to C for systems level stuff. It's a great choice to start a new DE/toolkit.
As for the rest, you're right the end user doesn't care about the language their graphical app is in, but the developers fielding their bug reports and making fixes/features sure do.
And developers who get familiar and easy tools such as cargo, rust-analyzer and all the popular libraries working in any Cosmic project in about five minutes. And the compiler will tell you if you managed to make memory errors or data races in a very clear way. Always the same way.
You learn Rust and its tools once, and you can just jump into any of these projects and be productive.
And yes, scripting language is needed for Cosmic at some point. There are a ton of them, from RHAI to different lisps to python to javascript. Plug and play, and the interop is easy and fast.
Rust is very hyped, but it's not very popular, the TIOBE index has it at 1.5% coming in #14. Which is paltry in comparison to Python, C and C++.
As for whether or not it will replace C in systems, time will tell.
TIOBE is weighted toward languages that have existed for a long time by virtue of counting lines written / skilled engineers etc. but the speed at which Rust is climbing that list is a better indicator. Also, a lot of the languages above it wouldn't be appropriate for anything like a DE.
But you're right, it's hyped, I just think the hype is real.
Yep, windows kernel has a ton of Rust code already, even some of its syscalls are made in Rust. Linux kernel is getting a new GPU driver for NVIDIA written in Rust, and GPU driver for removed M-series also written in Rust. removed is hiring Rust devs, so is Amazon, Meta, Google...
In the startup space it's been quite good with Rust for some time. I've been writing production code with it for almost a decade. It is not a fad anymore.
A productive, safe, fast and fun language to write with excellent tooling, and we are just getting started.
They use Rust for app dev already. Pretty sure they know what they are biting off.