As funny as this is I sometimes wonder about that crowd. Assuming the ecosystem at large flips and most software is now written in Rust what will the “rewrite it in Rust” crowd move to? Will they be satisfied for the most part or does it morph into “now rewrite in $latest_rust”?
I think the crowd will split into those who just cared about it being rust and those who wanted some kind of leverage to tempt others into doing something.
The former crowd will cease being, while the latter looks for something new to push.<p>I believe that one does not need to be overly concerned here. As with most things you will never satisfy zealots so it is sufficient to reconsider every once in a while when the status quo changed enough to warrant the effort (i.e. the actual arguments change).<p>It is always a choice to participate in these "culture wars" or whatever you want to call this. If you can stick to a decision you can limit the impact quite a bit, I've come to realize.
I've never been someone to tell others to rewrite in Rust but I am a huge fan of the language and have in fact rewritten a lot of things in Rust. I'd be happy for another programming language to excite me as much as Rust has for the last 10 years, and then maybe I'd join that evangelism club instead :). Not sure how PL evolution is going to go in an era of coding agents though, very curious how that'll play out.
You will always have <i>someone</i> say "you should rewrite it in <i>x</i>", but it's rare that something carves out so much ground on the Pareto front you'll get a crowd.
Maybe they’ll go back to “year of the Linux desktop”
Because it became a meme virtually everyone who says this are actually joking and not serious.<p>They'll move on to whatever the next meme is.
I think once you have it in Rust the next ask is using no "unsafe" code from that crowd.
I'd argue for moonbit -- faster compile times, almost as fast, smaller wasm artifacts and like lean can have proof of correctness built in.
what the point? Rewriting in Rust is not just a language change. Rust enforces designing systems in secure way to start with, not just memory safety.<p>For me last nail into becoming part of the crowd was Embassy. Whole my life I wrote some ad-hoc C microcontroller stuff. But just learning Embassy I realized that it could've been done much more elegantly and securely. If you have a spare moment, I would watch videos in this channel, old to new:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/@therustybits/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@therustybits/videos</a>