I don’t care in which language my editor is written in. From the user perspective, what sets it apart from the plethora of available and more mature editors?
I like knowing something is written in Rust because (1) the staying power of a language has implications for the staying power of the project (how many Ada projects do you see nowadays?) (2) I write Rust so I'm more likely to contribute to this, (3) I care about the safety and speed implications of language choice, but most of all (4) building from source usually isn't a pain with Rust's Cargo, but it is for most other languages.
All these things materially impact how interested I am in using and contributing to the project.
I don't get the point you're making. Yes, the popularity of technologies is impacted by the popularity of related technologies.
My argument is that Rust is certainly going to remain relevant for the next 20 years or so. When this project is no longer maintained, it probably won't be because Rust is no longer being developed, and it probably won't be because nobody writes Rust around.
If Lapce were written in something like Zig or Crystal, I wouldn't feel so certain about that. (Not a knock to Zig or Crystal.)
Just that Emacs was written almost a half century ago, and is still thriving despite being written in a language (LISP) that is basically obsolete.
> My argument is that Rust is certainly going to remain relevant for the next 20 years or so
Maybe, maybe not. Look at how quickly Perl (so promising to begin with) disappeared to be replaced by Python. Many new languages have tried, and continue to try, to replace C++ as a better alternative, and I'm sure the next 20 years will see more popup too. Is Rust the one?
If the likelihood of being around in 20 years with a still up-to-date library/tool ecosystem was the main decision making factor, then Java would probably be a safer bet.
> Just that Emacs was written almost a half century ago, and is still thriving despite being written in a language (LISP) that is basically obsolete.
Yes, this is true. I still stand by my point that the longevity of a language has implications for the longevity of most projects. It's a probabilistic statement with exceptions, and Emacs is exceptional.
It's also worth noting that Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp, a language which is regularly updated.
> Look at how quickly Perl (so promising to begin with) disappeared to be replaced by Python.
Don't get me wrong, Rust's longevity is a guess. It's in the Linux kernel now, so that gives me hope that learning Rust is paying off.
Cargo is fantastically nicer to use than most other languages tooling. If I'm wrong, then that means something even nicer than cargo is around, which would be very nice indeed.
> If the likelihood of being around in 20 years ... was the main decision making factor, then Java would probably be a safer bet.
This is true, but the premise doesn't hold. The longevity isn't the main decision making factor. No decision is even being made, and you're arguing against a point nobody is making.
Please refer to my original comment: I'm only listing reasons why I like knowing something is written in Rust.
“Has implications” is a very weak statement. Even if it is a very small effect but measurable fits that description.
“Irrelevant” is a very strong statement. It claims no effect at all. A single example does not justify the claim. You need at least some statistical evidence to support that claim.
For your last question, yes I do. I sometimes take over the abandoned project to maintain it too. Some open source users never contribute in any way, some do. I’m not sure why there’s a need to dismiss the existence of the latter kind of users. No one is claiming all users should be like that.
No, of course not, but the example does show that programming language is pretty much irrelevant.
The big lie of open source is "you have the source, so you can extend it and fix bugs yourself". Of course in theory (with enough expertise and motivation) you can do these, but in practice most open source users don't contribute to the project, so the language it is written in is entirely irrelevant.
When was the last time (if ever) you submitted a bug fix (not a report) for an open source tool you are using, let alone joined the project as a contributor?!
“Has implications” is a very weak statement. Even if it is a very small effect but measurable fits that description.
“Irrelevant” is a very strong statement. It claims no effect at all. A single example does not justify the claim. You need at least some statistical evidence to support that claim.
For your last question, yes I do. I sometimes take over the abandoned project to maintain it too. Some open source users never contribute in any way, some do. I’m not sure why there’s a need to dismiss the existence of the latter kind of users. No one is claiming all users should be like that.
- Truly open source, presumably without the caveats that VS Code has such as a few "features" (extensions) being closed source and the extension marketplace being closed to de-microsofted builds
- Designed from the beginning to support an extension API with a richness comparable to VS Code's (unlike Sublime, Jetbrains etc)
- Presumably aiming to put performance as a higher priority than is usual
If you believe that regexes are hard to debug and overly complex, you might resist a text editor written in perl because it's likely that regexes are used everywhere (even when they shouldn't be).
That said, I can totally see why it would matter to some people why language something is written in: you may want to study or contribute to an editor and you may prefer to focus on your preferred language
Exactly. I keep wanting to fall in love with Lapce or Helix because I'm very interested in Rust and like the idea of an editor that I could contribute to, but my (neo)vim muscle memory is just too strong, even minor differences drive me nuts.
For starters, it doesn't seem to use a browser engine to render its UI. Seems to aim for a VSCode look and feel. Installation on macOS is about a third of the install size of VSCode (105 MB vs 330 MB), and it's a single statically linked executable (vs a plethore of files in a VSCode installation).
