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"Rust enums make defining errors so simple with arbitrary payload."
enum variants are overused in Rust and are highly expensive in memory IMHO. One tends to run into problems like: https://github.com/serde-rs/json/issues/635 in Rust projects when used at scale. Value is an enum variant: https://docs.rs/serde_json/latest/serde_json/value/enum.Valu...
Comment from that issue:
The main topic of the article is about resource management (ie. allocation), which is automatic in Golang, so a comparison wouldn't make much sense in this context. Additionally, a requirement of the project is:
> On the engineering side of things, we are building a reliable, predictable system. And predictable means really predictable. Rather than reigning in sources of non-determinism, we build the whole system from the ground up from a set of fully deterministic, hand crafted components.
which rules out garbage collected languages (also see the design document here: https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle/blob/fe09404d46...).
https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/1974-global-allocators.html was the original RFC.
My vague understanding is that there's a working group https://github.com/rust-lang/wg-allocators
The further I get from working on Rust day to day, the less I know about these things, so that's all I've got for you.
> It's still bizarre though that Rust is capturing such ridiculous mindshare.
I don't think it's that bizarre. The two big headline features that bring Rust such popularity are: #1 "70% of bugs are memory-safety bugs" [1] and Rust can help solve those, and #2 C/C++ have a couple of package manager solutions - none of which have critical mass and Rust "comes with" cargo.
Those two make me really eager to continue experimenting with Rust.
> It seems to be a temporary low-level programming zeitgeist driven by YouTube and Reddit recommendation algorithms to an audience that has never done it and probably never will.
This is some weird gatekeep-y kinda thing. Most of us didn't start out with low-level programming. Wouldn't it have been odd and frustrating for someone to tell your younger self that you have "never written C and probably never will"?
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research
>Does nim have anything as polished and performant as clap and serde?
"Polished" and "high quality" are more subjective/implicitly about adoption, IMO. "Performant" has many dimensions. I just tested the Nim https://github.com/c-blake/cligen vs clap: cligen used 5X less object file space (with all size optimization tweaks enabled in both), 20% less run-time memory for large argument lists, and the same run-time per argument (with march=native equivalents on both, within statistical noise). cligen has many features - "did you mean?/suggestions", color generated help and all that - I do not see obvious feature in clap docs missing in cligen. The Nim binary serde showing is unlikely as good but there are like 10 JSON packages and that seems maybe your primary concern.
More to add color your point than disagree (and follow up on my "adoption") - your ideas about polish, quality, docs, etc. are part of feedback loop(s) you mentioned. More users => Users complain (What is confusing? What is missing? etc.) => things get fixed/cleaned up/improved => More users. Besides "performant" being multi-dimensional, the feedback loop is more of a "cyclic graph". :-) While I probably prefer Nim as much or more as @netbioserror, I am not too shocked by the mindshare capture. It seems to happen every 5..10 years or so in prog.langs.
While many of your points are not invalid, tech is also a highly hype-driven & fad-driven realm. In my experience, the more experience with this meta-feature that someone has, the more skeptical they are of the latest thing (more rounds of regret, etc.). Also, that feedback graph is not a pure good. Things can get too popular too quickly with near permanent consequences. ipv4 got popular so quickly that we are still mostly stuck on it 40 years later as ipv6 struggles for penetration. Whatever your favorite PL is, it may also grow features too fast.