Righty-ho, I’m back from Rust Nation, and busily horrifying my teenage daughter with my (admittedly atrocious) attempts at doing an English accent. It was a great trip with a lot of good conversations and some interesting observations. I am going to try to blog about some of them, starting with some thoughts spurred by Jon Seager’s closing keynote, “Rust Adoption At Scale with Ubuntu”.
There are many chasms out there
For some time now I’ve been debating with myself, has Rust “crossed the chasm”? If you’re not familiar with that term, it comes from a book that gives a kind of “pop-sci” introduction to the Technology Adoption Life Cycle.
The answer, of course, is it depends on who you ask. Within Amazon, where I have the closest view, the answer is that we are “most of the way across”: Rust is squarely established as the right way to build at-scale data planes or resource-aware agents and it is increasingly seen as the right choice for low-level code in devices and robotics as well – but there remains a lingering perception that Rust is useful for “those fancy pants developers at S3” (or wherever) but a bit overkill for more average development.
On the other hand, within the realm of Safety Critical Software, as Pete LeVasseur wrote in a recent rust-lang blog post, Rust is still scrabbling for a foothold. There are a number of successful products but most of the industry is in a “wait and see” mode, letting the early adopters pave the path.
“Crossing the chasm” means finding “reference customers”
The big idea that I at least took away from reading Crossing the Chasm and other references on the technology adoption life cycle is the need for “reference customers”. When you first start out with something new, you are looking for pioneers and early adopters that are drawn to new things:
What an early adopter is buying [..] is some kind of change agent. By being the first to implement this change in the industry, the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition. – from Crossing the Chasm
But as your technology matures, you have to convince people with a lower and lower tolerance for risk:
The early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. – from Crossing the Chasm
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