What problem does rust solve other languages (D, SML, OCaml, C++11, Objective C, vala, go etc.) did not -- apart from helping with the NIH syndrome? Does Mozilla actually use a language that still is a moving target with respect to its language specification for some substantial work (or what is the real-world status of that upcoming rendering engine which seems to be the reason why rust was called into life)?
They are working on a browser called "servo". It is still early in development.
Vs OCaml it has a threading model. Vs D memory safety, less kitchen sink. Vs C++ cleaner, better type system, memory safety. Vs Objective C memory safety, cleaner. Vs vala I don't know anything about vala. Vs go Here is their list of problems with Go from their website:
Shared mutable state.
Global GC.
Null pointers.
No RAII or destructors.
No type-parametric user code.
Ah, but I think it's important to distinguish between ideas that are new in research and ideas that are new in industry. God knows that pattern matching isn't a particularly new concept, but I sure hadn't heard of it before Rust; see also the popularization of list comprehensions due to Python via Haskell. So I think what the grandparent is implying is that even if Rust doesn't end up as a world-shattering language, it still has the opportunity to expose programmers to "new" ideas, even if, in academia's opinion, those ideas aren't so new at all. :)
Exactly, for example, now thanks to the FP concepts that have been added to .NET in the last versions, I am able to do cool FP stuff while coding boring enterprise applications in C#, without having to ask permission about it.
Or make use of F# for Windows scripting, using as excuse to the boss that it is part of Visual Studio.
