@phnt @cjd @TheMadPirate @david @ins0mniak

> It's the COBOL of the modern age.

A better analogue is probably Fortran. C fits in places that other languages cannot, it's got a lot of uses, and it's more or less a lingua franca. COBOL lived forever not because it was the best tool for the job, but because managers and government loved it and it gained a lot of inertia; Java or Perl would be more like a modern COBOL.

> Where Rust will probably "win" is applications at the complete end of the chain. And maybe system runtime libraries, but it probably won't go deeper than that.

There's only one compiler, it's LLVM-based, and this kind of dooms it to live inside a small ecosystem. When there's more than one implementation, then there's maybe a chance that it goes somewhere. C, Fortran, Python, Ruby, even hairy languages like C++ and Common Lisp have a lot of implementations.

There probably could be another implementation (and if it were done in Rust, that would free it from its own ecosystem and people could add better support for cross-compilation and new targets) but I don't think most Rust coders are interested in following St. Terry's advice. :terrywow:

> There's no point in "winning" a "language war".

Yeah. I think the Rust Evangelism Strike Force has that kind of mindset, though: annexation instead of expansion.