I imagine there are different motivations for different people.
Some people may just want to use rust to re-implement something that exists in order to hone their skills or just for fun. Having a reference implementation makes that more productive.
Other people may think that it would simply be better if the project were implemented in rust. This is the case for some C projects, where a lot of control is still necessary but the project would benefit from the safety and productivity gains of rust. See the example of QEMU yesterday. It is an absolute pain in the ass to do things well in C. Correct programs end up being heaps of boilerplate and tests. I'd love to escape C but haven't been able to until Rust.
Maybe some people just want to showcase that Rust can do the thing. I think that's fine. It might help in adoption. It might cause better libraries to be created that are actually used.
For me, rust is the first real competitor in the systems programming market. There are hundreds of languages for application programming. I prefer Haskell, Java and JS for those but I've never found a replacement for C in the low-level domain. C++ just never cut it for me and the alternatives never really caught on. For me, Rust brings a lot of what we learned from Haskell and ML to C without sacrificing the low-level control. If I wanted to get better at Rust, I'd probably also implement something that exists just so I could check my work. If I was to re-implement some of the low-level projects that I've worked on, I'd also probably do that in Rust.
I'm getting really tired of comments like this though. Why does it bother you so much? Are you trying to communicate that you'd prefer this person be doing something else with their time? What does that even mean?
>For me, rust is the first real competitor in the systems programming market. There are hundreds of languages for application programming. I prefer Haskell, Java and JS for those but I've never found a replacement for C in the low-level domain
There is Pascal
I have used Pascal as safe C alternative for twenty years
It has solved all the C problems. Strings/Arrays know their length, you can enable range/overflow checking, reference counting ...
I don't know enough about Julia, but the definition of "systems" is different in Go vs. C/C++/Rust. Go is more of a Python, Ruby or Node competitor while Rust is more of a C, C++ or D competitor.
Doesn't mean that there is no overlap, but when you wish to go closer to the metal, picking Rust makes lots of sense.
Julia is positioned well to be a powerful high performance language in a niche market, that of scientific simulation, due to is reliance on long running. It also doesn't consistently match C benchmarks last I checked, "only" getting within a factor of 2 or 3. For a pythonlike language its very impressive and powerful, but its main competitive power is as a higher performance replacement for Matlab or mathy python.
Its gradually typed, and compiles down to typed code with LLVM on first run. So after a warmup (which can be cached) its effectively static for purposes of performance.
I was quoting the developers. I'll take their word for it. Whether something is compiled or not is orthogonal. I need strong static typing, preferably with algebraic data types. Julia doesn't provide any of that, Rust provides all of that.
Keep in mind that the person who posed this appears to have nothing to do with the project, they're just someone who's seen something that interests them and shared it here, the same as the people voting it up.
Some people may just want to use rust to re-implement something that exists in order to hone their skills or just for fun. Having a reference implementation makes that more productive.
Other people may think that it would simply be better if the project were implemented in rust. This is the case for some C projects, where a lot of control is still necessary but the project would benefit from the safety and productivity gains of rust. See the example of QEMU yesterday. It is an absolute pain in the ass to do things well in C. Correct programs end up being heaps of boilerplate and tests. I'd love to escape C but haven't been able to until Rust.
Maybe some people just want to showcase that Rust can do the thing. I think that's fine. It might help in adoption. It might cause better libraries to be created that are actually used.
For me, rust is the first real competitor in the systems programming market. There are hundreds of languages for application programming. I prefer Haskell, Java and JS for those but I've never found a replacement for C in the low-level domain. C++ just never cut it for me and the alternatives never really caught on. For me, Rust brings a lot of what we learned from Haskell and ML to C without sacrificing the low-level control. If I wanted to get better at Rust, I'd probably also implement something that exists just so I could check my work. If I was to re-implement some of the low-level projects that I've worked on, I'd also probably do that in Rust.
I'm getting really tired of comments like this though. Why does it bother you so much? Are you trying to communicate that you'd prefer this person be doing something else with their time? What does that even mean?