There's been a big gap, in languages, for decades. Those that do, put up with C-alikes, or C, and got on with things. Ivory tower libtards and troons made good ideas, with mathematical rigor, but could rarely get out of the towers.
You are not selling ML syntax, nor Haskell semantics, to normal programmers, full stop. But, there's a lot of waste in C and C++, in terms of necessary cognitive effort to do things that shouldn't need to be so hard, or intricate. But, most higher-level languages abstract away too much, and/or gave low or unpredictable performance.
Rust was thought up, at least its seeds, at just the right time and outside of the corporate or university world's. It brings functional programming semantics with it, but using more typical syntax, and let's you skip having to care about so many off-by-1 errors, keeping a safe stack, etc., but also let's you take the training wheels off, when needed.
It's got problems, as a language, some major (like a lack of defined stable ABI, and unsound type system), but it does things in the real world, from the fingers of normal programmers, that will look at you funny if you start talking about monads, that have been only in academic papers for the last few decades. Credit where credit is due.
However, it's community got taken over by lefties early on, and we're stuck with that. As a result, much of that infectious code, rewriting things that work well, already, tends to suck, and is mainly used as another way to get crazy leftists into gate kept communities that have previously been hard to crack, largely apolitical, meritocracies, on variations of arguments that C should not be the low level future, which most people would agree with (just that most attempts to replace it only deal with the surface level problems, or started out poorly, and never recovered, outside of niche cases - IE, Ada).
There's been a big gap, in languages, for decades. Those that do, put up with C-alikes, or C, and got on with things. Ivory tower libtards and troons made good ideas, with mathematical rigor, but could rarely get out of the towers.
You are not selling ML syntax, nor Haskell semantics, to normal programmers, full stop. But, there's a lot of waste in C and C++, in terms of necessary cognitive effort to do things that shouldn't need to be so hard, or intricate. But, most higher-level languages abstract away too much, and/or gave low or unpredictable performance.
Rust was thought up, at least its seeds, at just the right time and outside of the corporate or university world's. It brings functional programming semantics with it, but using more typical syntax, and let's you skip having to care about so many off-by-1 errors, keeping a safe stack, etc., but also let's you take the training wheels off, when needed.
It's got problems, as a language, some major (like a lack of defined stable ABI, and unsound type system), but it does things in the real world, from the fingers of normal programmers, that will look at you funny if you start talking about monads, that have been only in academic papers for the last few decades. Credit where credit is due.
However, it's community got taken over by lefties early on, and we're stuck with that. As a result, much of that infectious code, rewriting things that work well, already, tends to suck, and is mainly used as another way to get crazy leftists into gate kept communities that have previously been hard to crack, largely apolitical, meritocracies, on variations of arguments that C should not be the low level future, which most people would agree with (just that most attempts to replace it only deal with the surface level problems, or started out poorly, and never recovered, outside of niche cases - IE, Ada).