I’ve been keeping an eye on Rust for a while now, so when I read Alberto’s statement of support for more Rust use in GNOME, I couldn’t resist piling on…

From the perspective of someone who’s quite used to C, it does indeed seem to tick all the boxes. High performance, suitability for low-level tasks and C ABI compatibility tend to be sticking points with new languages — and Rust kills it in those departments. Anyone who needs further convincing should read up on Raph Levien’s font renderer. The usual caveat about details vis-a-vis the Devil applies, but the general idea looks exactly right. Rust’s expressiveness and lack of baggage means it could even outperform C for non-trivial code, on top of all the other advantages.

There are risks too, of course. I’d worry about adoption, growth and the availability of bindings/libraries/other features, like a good optional GC for high-level apps (there is at least one in the works, but it doesn’t seem to be quite ready for prime-time yet). Rust is on an upwards trajectory, and there doesn’t seem to be many tasks where it’s eminently unsuitable, so in theory, it could have a wide reach: operating systems, platform libraries, both client- and server-side applications, games and so on. However, it doesn’t appear to be the de facto language in many contexts yet. Consider the statement “If I learn language X, I will then be able to work on Y.” Substitute for X: Java, Javascript, Python, ObjC, C, C++, C# or even Visual Basic — and Y becomes obvious. How does Rust fare?

That is, of course, a very conservative argument, while in my mind the GNOME project represents, for better or worse, and C use notwithstanding, a more radical F/OSS philosophy. Its founding was essentially formulated as a revolt against the Qt license (and a limited choice of programming languages!), it was an early adopter of Git for version control, and it’s a driver for Wayland and Flatpak now. For what it’s worth, speaking as mostly a downstream integrator, I wouldn’t mind it if GNOME embraced its DNA yet again and fully opened the door to Rust.