This Month in Ladybird

Out of curiosity, where are you located where large companies are desperately trying to snap up every available Rust developer? Everywhere I've looked, the few Rust job postings I've seen have mainly been from cryptocurrency startups. All of the non-crypto Rust job postings I've seen are from companies trying to get experts in a particular niche. Must have 8 years of Linux kernel development experience plus 3 years of Rust experience, must have 5 years of network driver development experience plus 4 years of Rust experience, that sort of thing. Even including crypto startups, I see far more C++ jobs than Rust jobs.

The industry is not moving to Rust. There are projects here and there, but mostly for safety critical code and other situations where it makes sense, see chromium and Windows kernel. I don't know any major project stopping active development in C++ and switching to Rust instead.

You may live in a bubble. Rust is great and all but C++ is still dominant in its space. The web browser you're using right now? C++. The OS you're using? Probably some unholy mixture of C and C++. Console and computer games? Written in C++ as a rule.

There are plenty of embedded projects still being started with c. C++ also has a lot of demand where i am at.

The advice about career is very geography and industry dependent. Almost no one hired Node.js developers in my city back when i started.

There are a lot of comments that I unfortunately cannot address individually so I'll make a single reply and try to address them all. A lot of valid call outs pointing out flaws in my claim and even extrapolating from my claim, please understand my coarse answer balanced brevity and thoroughness. I'll do my best to expand and provide evidence:

I am plugged into an alumni network (based in the US) so I'd say I have a decent sample size to draw conclusions/trends from. Yes, these trends don't apply to every market or locality so there are loads of counter examples. The demographics of the alum network appear to be mostly mid-to-senior level ICs and management from backgrounds being engineers in the private sector and gov contractors. The start-up scene is grossly under-represented.

The tell-tale sign of a mature technology that has the momentum to last is if businesses that do a lot of gov contracts finally adopt a technology. We've seen this pattern with virtualization, then with containers, then with clouds + micro-services. Gov contractors are very conservative to adopt and rely on technology because ultimately their customer (gov agencies) maintain the service. And their pay are not like big tech so they cannot compete on that front and need a healthy and established pool of talent to pick from.

Every successful project is staffed with leads who know the problem space and the technology that is used in the solution. When planning for a project, you HAVE to account for how easy it will be to find talent to support the project given your budget. For short-term or "high-risk-of-being-on-time" projects the talent pool is obviously larger for established technologies like c++ and so that is what has historically been chosen. Obviously where it is appropriate to use c++. For those of you claiming I am in a bubble... perhaps. But keep in mind that companies with a "first to market" mentality are not the majority :)

The point of inflection for Rust I am continually noticing, and why I am confident it is an excellent for career-growth, it is NOT being labeled as a "high risk" for new medium to long-term projects/efforts. When there is runway to grow/find Rust developers and there is runway to develop a missing library that is a dependency, Rust seems to be favored. Yes, if your industry is dependent stable and battle tested libraries then that is a case when Rust might not displace it. But another trend that backs up my claims is seeing parts of such libraries/projects being refactored out into its own thing written in Rust - and all that lives in parallel. So perhaps the dev that knows both languages is the better career advice. Lean toward one language or another based on your interests.

One final thing I will add is there is a good deal of "internal learning" opportunities for already employed folks to learn rust and start on the new project. These are folks that know memory management, know the problem space, know the company tooling, etc. Compare that with a new hire that will also learn rust, and you can see which an employer will favor. Internal folks moving to Rust opportunities and back-filling them with new c++ devs is a common tactic. But that being said, talent still needs to be found and often times casting a wider net by looking for c++ folks that are willing to transition to Rust is a tactic used on job postings. Rust is in demand for systems programmers and zero trust applications, btw.

I wish I lived in the same world as you.

There's basically 0 rust jobs available that aren't scam startups.

I don't understand the hate towards C++. Many of the aspects criticized for are non-issues in modern C++. I am not to knowledgable about Rust, but what reason is there to use Rust? Memory safety isn't much of a problem in C++ anymore with smart pointers, std::move. Implicit typing exists in C++ with std::auto. Functional programming with lambda, std::functional, std::map, etc. C++ does everything I have wanted it to do, has a huge ecosystem of libraries, and great tools.

They're likely moving to swift not rust.

> The limiting factor is available rust devs. Writing c++ is a sure way to get hired maintaining a legacy codebase.

Anyone looking to be extremely employable in this market should really learn both.

Otherwise, you are not going to see a migration to Rust from C++ shops at all.

> Ladybird is an outlier and there are probably a few more project like it. but anyone looking to be employed should pick up the new skill that is rust.

Then I suggest you prepare for Leetcode hards on Rust code, if you want to show that you are highly experienced in solving DSA problems that are found in systems software.

Also, why does Ladybird get a pass and the others don't?

I haven't watched the VODs myself but I am curious as to the nature of the Copilot use - is it a fancy autocomplete, a 2nd look at code he's already written, or is it generating large parts of the code?

The SerenityOS project literally has "NIH syndrome" at its core ["the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch.", https://ladybird.org/#faq] so I would expect a degree of skepticism of AI code generation.

But there was the post semi-recently about Cloudflare developers shipping a mostly-AI-generated software, overseen by real devs [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166] Perhaps Andreas' use of Copilot is a similar thing, where he saves keystrokes and finds errors in the generated output with his own experience. I'll go watch some VODs.

With some "Thank you, Copilot"-s sprinkled in to spare him in the robot uprising universe.

Amazing, going to try it again right now. I had also tried a few months ago.

I did assume good intentions and gave them the benefit of the doubt: that's why I asked them why they were using a commanding tone and said nothing else. They clarified that indeed, their intentions were good and so being rude and sounding commanding wasn't the intent, and that was the end of that. Why do you have to turn this into something bigger? It was a done topic.

I also disagree that this isn't helpful. *

For one, they're now aware that they come off as commanding when they write like this. They now know they should look up why that is (if they care), and how to alter their language accordingly. This should serve them well, since it makes their use of language more in line with their intentions, and prevents them from receiving rude / more involved meta responses from those who don't assume good intentions or aren't willing to hear them out like I did. It should also prevent them accidentally causing reputational harm to the projects and organizations they're trying to support this way.

Second, since I kept it brief and minimal, I avoided other people asking about this not so nicely and not so straightforward. Could have turned into an ugly flamewar.

Speaking of, I do not understand why some people have it so out for "tone policing". It feels like an overreaction, a grand backwards swing in response to supposed "moderation overreach / censorship". Admittedly very in vogue these days, but cultural standards exist for a reason. I refuse to be forced to decide between the two extremes of overpolicing and no policement at all. I do also appreciate the value of just letting moderation tools and moderators do their job, but I do still have some - increasingly faint - hope that with some people, communication is also a viable way - as it was in this case.

* And I further disagree that being helpful in terms of information content or effect would be mutually exclusive with all this, or would even be related. Helping alone doesn't make a helpful person, particularly if helping isn't the explicit intention.

Thank you for your helpful comment. I’m compiling it right now :)

Four browsers!

Nobody's good at C++. I've written C++ and even got to the point where I felt I had things under control, but tbh that's just delusion and hubris.

> Most GUI toolkits do not.

Why are you guys talking like there were dozens of GUI toolkits in mainstream use? It's basically web stuff, Qt, and then everything else. Web would be UTF-16 as discussed above, Qt is UTF-16, and even if we entertain the admittedly "large just behind-the-scenes" Java/.NET market, that's also all UTF-16. WxWidgets being a fence sitter can do both UTF-8 and UTF-16, depending on the platform.

Which players am I missing? GTK and ImGUI? I don't think they are too big a slices of this pie, certainly not big enough to invalidate the claim.

Apple also uses some kind of UTF-16 internally, afaik