I guess Rust related stuff is often ranked high at HN (and reddit/programming) for mainly two reasons:
1. It is a very interesting language. Personally I find it fascinating (coming from imperative languages). Some blog posts are really worth the high ranking.
2. It's an enthusiats language. They tend to be emotional on their subject. That's why Rust is indeed overpromoted compared to other languages. People getting their stuff done are often using boring tools like Java, C/C++ or Go and are not hanging around here in language threads very often.
Rust is not prevalent in the industry at all. People reporting how it's used by Microsoft and Amazon etc. are not telling lies, but often forget to see the big picture. Compared to C/C++ or Java Rust's usage is tiny. Less than 1%. I'd say even less then 0.01 % worldwide in terms of people using it, lines of code written daily, project budget spend on. But how often are people writing posts "Why we adopted Java" or "How we improved backend performance by 300% using C++"? Rust is kind of vocal, so the overall picture of it's usage is quite distorted.
Still, the usage of Rust has been going up the last 5 years. So it is gaining. And it's a great fit for certain tasks.
1. It is a very interesting language. Personally I find it fascinating (coming from imperative languages). Some blog posts are really worth the high ranking.
2. It's an enthusiats language. They tend to be emotional on their subject. That's why Rust is indeed overpromoted compared to other languages. People getting their stuff done are often using boring tools like Java, C/C++ or Go and are not hanging around here in language threads very often.
Rust is not prevalent in the industry at all. People reporting how it's used by Microsoft and Amazon etc. are not telling lies, but often forget to see the big picture. Compared to C/C++ or Java Rust's usage is tiny. Less than 1%. I'd say even less then 0.01 % worldwide in terms of people using it, lines of code written daily, project budget spend on. But how often are people writing posts "Why we adopted Java" or "How we improved backend performance by 300% using C++"? Rust is kind of vocal, so the overall picture of it's usage is quite distorted.
Still, the usage of Rust has been going up the last 5 years. So it is gaining. And it's a great fit for certain tasks.