The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.
If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.
I do think there are long-term benefits in many cases, it just depends on available resources. There are plenty of projects that desperately need a rewrite for maintenance reasons alone so you might as well examine if language switch is worth it. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of success stories, even if there’s projects like sudo-rs where we’re, at best, not sure if there’s tangible benefits.
This is why its generally better to only write new code in more memory safe langs instead of rewriting everything
The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.
If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.
I do think there are long-term benefits in many cases, it just depends on available resources. There are plenty of projects that desperately need a rewrite for maintenance reasons alone so you might as well examine if language switch is worth it. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of success stories, even if there’s projects like sudo-rs where we’re, at best, not sure if there’s tangible benefits.