I don't know nothin' about nothin', but Mozilla's involvement in Rust is a huge plus that someone is focused on the right things. Don't have to be the biggest thing in the world to do good for the world, or industry.
I get a sense that the hype surrounding Rust has fallen away rather quickly since its 1.0 release around half a year ago. I won't speculate on why that is, but for a language that was poised to become very popular very quickly, we've seen remarkably little use of it so far.
The only major Rust projects at this point are Rust and Servo, and both of them are quite closely tied to each other. There are a handful of libraries, and lots of small-scale demos or sample code, but that's about it.
We aren't seeing companies across the board rushing to use it. We aren't seeing more than a handful of significant open source projects using it. We aren't seeing freelancers use it for their projects. We aren't seeing researchers use it. We aren't seeing academics adopt it for teaching purposes.
Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did. While Rust will likely have some future, its impact may be much smaller than many of us anticipated even just a year ago.
> Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did.
You seem to have a very short memory. Go's first memorable and noteworthy projects, Docker and Vitess, didn't appear until almost exactly a year after its 1.0 release (and the language itself had been largely stable for two years prior to 1.0). Both Java and C# took just as long to find widespread traction, and that was with much more determined and focused backers. Meanwhile, Ruby was around for a decade before finding any significant adoption. You didn't mention Python, but it took 15 years of laboring in Perl's shadow for it to finally ascend into the greater programming consciousness.
For reference, Rust has been out for six months now. :P And fortunately, I can tell you that Rust is getting action at a lot of companies, and we're excited to see them start writing reports about their experience.
Rust is trying to improve the quality of core infrastructure, not random CRUD apps. It takes time for large companies to rewrite and migrate these systems, but it is indeed happening behind closed doors (source: private conversations with said companies).
It's been less than a year since 1.0. Most development is closed source behind closed doors, so you won't get to hear about new things being built in Rust. A bunch of startups, as well as Dropbox are using Rust, for example.
I would call Redox and Piston large rust projects as well.
There has been at least one OS course being taught with Rust as well.
