I'll agree on several counts (as a physicist too!):
* Rust's tooling lets you have a base-floor of what is acceptable code that is much more palatable than non-top tier Julia codes. There's a world of difference opening a random crate's code in Rust that has been linted/clippy'd/check'd by the compiler rather than a random Julia package that a coworker/colleague just fired up. This tooling is getting better and better in Julia and I'd be interested to hear which Julia projects you worked on were really hampered by TTFX and refactoring woes. Hard agree on the footguns - I want the VSCode plugin to be better at detecting dead code, it cost me weeks on a project lately.
* I'm also excited for some notion of interfaces to come to Julia. Perhaps it will be a 2.0 thing, but there's still lots of design stuff to figure out.
* We have different understandings of "productive" for different focii then - I still find it painful to do the equivalent of `rand(1:10, (20, 20))` in Rust and I can get STEM people to be productive with Julia before you can even finishing saying "borrowchecker".
At least for some scientific computing codes, but I did learn a lot of Rust along the way and extended my knowledge into (some) embedded and systems programming. Learning has been fun and the Rust people have been very friendly.
Precisely, the most natural symbiosis for a Julia + Rust combo seems to fill a hard-realtime, critical safety or embedded niche with offline simulation.
The Py03 and maturin story is something that we haven't brought to Julia yet and I'd love to have some time to work on a tighter integration story there. For example, getting a hot-reload with Revise.jl and a bindings generator that watches file changes and recompiles and the fly so that a Julia REPL gets updated with the new definitions would be so enviable.
I haven't spoken to Tim Holy to see how to string that together but many of the pieces are there.
When I wrote this, my main takeaways were numerical computations with arrays, which don't tend to use for loops in Rust, and which require grokking iterators for maximum performance and rayon-parallelism boons.
To a Julia audience, seeing this style of iterator chaining is quite a new flavor to think about composing computation, so I wanted it was with that audience in mind that I wrote this.
I have no idea why this blog is making the rounds again and I've learned a lot of Rust since, see my (badly benchmarked!) presentation at this year's Scientific Computing in Rust 2024:
I'll have to revisit this blog at some point and see what I should update, as well as a "From Rust to Julia" post for those that want to venture into that world as well.
Peeve of mine: blog posts that lack a date stamp. The only date appearing anywhere in the article is at the bottom, where it says "Last modified: August 29, 2024." So for all I knew it was a brand new post, until this comment. How old is it actually?
