Presumably this is gray because it's a quip, but I think that's about right. So, so, so much rust is being written for applications that just don't need it. For almost everything[1] a managed runtime like Go or Java or .NET is going to be just as effectively deployed, significantly cheaper to develop and much cheaper to maintain.
And the situations where you really need a "systems programming" environment have been really at best a wash with Rust. It's mostly replacing boring middleware (c.f. the linked article). Where are the rustacean routing engines and database backends and codecs and kernels? Not in deployment anywhere, not yet. C still rules that world, even for new features.
[1] Well, everything big enough to need a typesafe high performance platform. The real "everything", to first approximation, should be in python.
> For almost everything a managed runtime like Go or Java or .NET is going to be just as effectively deployed, significantly cheaper to develop
That might be true. I personally still prefer to use a language with sum-types and exhaustive pattern matching for encoding business logic.
> and much cheaper to maintain.
[citation needed]
> Where are the rustacean routing engines and database backends and codecs and kernels? Not in deployment anywhere, not yet.
It is used at Amazon on Firecracker, S3, EC2, CloudFront, Route 53, and that's just what was publicly talked about in 2020[0].
It is used in Android, including in the Kernel[1].
It is used at Microsoft, including in the Kernel[2].
It is used extensively in Firefox, and less extensively in Chrome. JPEG XL might be reincorporated into them because there's a Rust codec in the works.
For databases, the earliest I remember is TiKV[3], which hit 1.0 back in 2018. There are others since.
> C still rules that world, even for new features.
Almost the entire early large scale adoption came from people writing async web services.
From 2023:
> In that regard, async/await has been phenomenally successful. Many of the most prominent sponsors of the Rust Foundation, especially those who pay developers, depend on async/await to write high performance network services in Rust as one of their primary use cases that justify their funding.
