You need to stop thinking like the fediverse is a popularity contest. The fediverse is not about anyone “winning”, it’s not about one app or service becoming “the” place to be. The fediverse is not like the big tech closed social media platforms.

If you like Piefed, you should use it. If you prefer Lemmy, use that. If you want to make your own fediverse service, you can do that.

If Piefed suddenly gets super popular, everyone wins cause Piefed connects to everyone else, like Lemmy and Mastodon does too.

A rising tide lifts all boats. The point of the fediverse is not winning, but choice. Everyone has their own choice to make about their use of software, and nobody has to force that choice upon you.

Because some have released updated kernels while others haven’t

The score sounds a bit overblown considering this is for MPTCP which is as far as I understand rarely used? And it sounds like the chance of this leading to anything more than a crash is low. But whatever.

It’s a data race. Memory safety is still super important for security.

I agree that dependencies and package management is a real problem in programming nowadays, but it is not a problem unique to Rust. In fact, I struggle to name a single popular language nowadays that doesn’t have the exact same problems.

It’s not so much “But that’s not how you build stable software.” It’s more like “But that’s not how you build software [at all today].” Modern software is powered by loads of shared packages, that’s just how all modern languages work. This is equally true for Rust and Python.

Rust still has the edge here btw. Rust libraries (crates) are often very high quality with very good documentation. The language again helps here a lot, by providing extensive tooling for automatic documentation generation. Documentation in other languages are is far less helpful or poorly written. This is also again something that helps an AI write better code (just as it helps humans write better code).

The packaging also helps elevate Rust to a high-level language, because you can build easily usable abstractions in packages that can be used in simple programs. All the complexity can be hidden away in a crate and suddenly Rust feels more like Python. I think that’s actually a good thing from package managers.

Right now everyone is asking their AI agents to rewrite programs in Rust or C or assembly. This is fun, but it’s not a serious attempt at optimization.

C or assembly seems pointless and only for performance. But the reason people (re) write programs in Rust is because Rust as a language has a lot of guardrails that help make a program more stable, more correct. That reliability is the real reason for Rust. The performance is just a cherry on top.

This is actually exactly what you want in a language for AI. This is anecdotal from my side, but in my experience, an AI writing Rust will write far less sloppy crap than an AI writing Python.

Most of the argument against Rust has historically been that prototyping is slow and the language is a bother to write because the compiler makes it hard. But this only holds if humans are the bottleneck for writing the code! Rust therefore has all of the benefits but basically none of the downsides when having an AI write it.