How is “most beloved” a prerequisite to writing network drivers? Don’t get me wrong, if Rust is a good technical fit, then that’s great, but so convince me on those objective measures.
"Most beloved" is a weird way to put it but if it's a way to gauge the state of the language's ecosystem I'd say it's a very practical concern.
For instance these past few days I've been writing a small bootloader for some embedded ARM chip. I pondered going with Rust but ended up using C for two main reasons:
- I know that if it's doable in Rust it's doable in C but the opposite is not always true (or straightforward). In particular bare-metal/very low level Rust is still somewhat experimental, you can't use stable Rust if you want to be able to use inline ASM or other advanced features. I have very tight constraints regarding code size and memory use and I was concerned that I might not control that as effectively with Rust code than with C.
- There's already a bunch of C code written for this chip that I can reuse without any friction (no binding generation, no ffi etc...). The vendor even provides a huge header file with the full memory map and some code to init the PLLs.
If you're coding in a vacuum then how "beloved" a language is is mostly irrelevant but if you want to benefit from the ecosystem then having a language that people want to use and support is extremely important. The tooling will mature and stabilize as more and more people use Rust to write bare-metal code and device drivers, which will eventually make my first point above irrelevant. Then if the language becomes popular enough it will be easier to find Rust code or pre-made crates to do what you want which will hopefully eventually solve my 2nd issue.
No, Cortex A in an Arria10 SoC. The boot process is tedious because you have to load the FPGA before you can access the external RAM so the stage 1 bootloader has to fit 256KB code+data. Currently I'm using a multi-stage U-Boot but for simplicity and robustness I'd like to cram everything in a single stage loader.
Since I can't get u-boot to create a small enough image with all the features that I want (and also because I want to add vendor-specific customizations on top) I decided to try and rewrite a small, single purpose loader from scratch. I considered Rust but then that meant that I'd have to port or rewrite all of u-boot's code I want to reuse (especially the vendor code contributed by Altera mentioned in the previous post). So C it is.
Popularity influences ecosystem which influences programs written in the language. A language is more than just its spec. Larger mind share improves availability and quality of 3rd party libs, features, performance and quality of the compiler, brain power to guide the language forward, etc.
"People like it" is a major positive. Compare to C++, which often gets neglected in favour of C even in cases where it would probably be better, because most people _hate_ it.
I don't think most people hate C++. They certainly didn't at my last job, especially with the awesome new additions to the language (which granted aren't any good if you can't use them, but we could).
Still, I do think you're right that a significant number of people hate C++, so I think your point is still valid.
Most peoples' experience of C++ is from long before C++17 or even C++11 were usable. I'd agree that someone encountering modern C++ for the first time today, or willing to give it a second chance, might end up quite liking it, but if your first exposure was to an older code-base, that would put you off very easily.
