> A big problem with Rust, long-term, is that the kind of programs that really need it are somewhat out of today's mainstream. It's not that useful for webcrap. It's not that useful for phone apps. The AI people use Jupyter notebooks and Python to drive code on GPUs.
One thing this is missing is that Rust is useful for libraries callable by many different languages. You may or may not want to use it to build an actual Web app (I personally think it's a solid choice, but reasonable people can disagree). But for building, say, the Python cryptography library [1], which is used as a part of "webcrap", Jupyter notebooks, and in many other domains, Rust is clearly an excellent option. Nobody is going to build core Python infrastructure in Go or Node, and without the plumbing libraries none of the higher-level applications can function.
Except that is the exact reason why I would pick C++ instead of Rust, the Java, .NET and JS ecosystems are written on top of C++, and the libraries I might want to write bindings for, are also written in C++.
Adding another language in the middle will only complicate our toolchain.
Regarding Python, with the pressure from Ruby, PHP, JS and Julia JIT compilers, they will eventually get more serious about JIT adoption, and then there is ctypes of OS APIs.
You mean to link against Rust binaries or can you make library files too? Compared to, say, SQLite as a single C file, I thought that Rust projects are not super easy to use as a dependency
Rust can output library files that use the C calling convention, either static or dynamic. Doing this entirely by hand is pretty annoying, because your API surface has to be C-compatible (so can't contain a lot of Rust's useful language features) and because you still have to do the other half of the FFI to use the library from the other language. However, it's possible to develop automated language-specific tooling to make this easier, with PyO3 being a particularly impressive example.
Depends on how you link rust, using PyO3 makes it arguably easier to do link python code to rust than any C construction I could think off.
Linking a single C file into python is quite difficult (if not using JIT like cppyy) because you need to make bindings & conversion often on both sides for each exported function.
One thing this is missing is that Rust is useful for libraries callable by many different languages. You may or may not want to use it to build an actual Web app (I personally think it's a solid choice, but reasonable people can disagree). But for building, say, the Python cryptography library [1], which is used as a part of "webcrap", Jupyter notebooks, and in many other domains, Rust is clearly an excellent option. Nobody is going to build core Python infrastructure in Go or Node, and without the plumbing libraries none of the higher-level applications can function.
[1]: https://github.com/pyca/cryptography