Re: MAUI?
Completely agree, and indeed a fair point to make.
MAUI is so not in .NET yet that you have to download a preview version of Visual Studio to use it - or at least that was the case a few weeks back. But I think that it's existence and on-going development is a suggestion that MS are fairly serious about having another go at it.
Time will tell. If they do pull it off, it could be an interesting result. It could also be half-formed, too incomplete to actually be of use for cross platform. It's not that long ago that the thought of MS officially supporting .NET on anything other than Windows would have been unthinkable, and here we are finding it to be lodged on the core repos for several major Linux distros. So, who knows.
Is it Too Little, Too Late?
In the sense of, is the time of managed code (Java, .NET, etc) beginning to come to an end?
What's quite surprising about Rust is the sheer diversity of stuff that people are doing with it, everything from whole OSes to Web services, etc. Can it be a universal language? Far too early to tell of course. The memory safety aspects of Rust are a big chunk of what Java and .NET were all about originally.
Again, time will tell. Rust I think could surprise us all, as it's been surprising us all the way through. Mozilla create a new programming language? Nah. Mozilla comes up with a pretty unique take on a language - memory safety but no run time garbage collector? No way. People create whole OSes using it? Most unlikely. Linus Torvalds doesn't dismiss it out of hand, for Linux source code? No chance. Major OS houses like MS and Google publicly say they're looking at it too? Pah.
I'd not bet against it in the long run.
Of course, it's a totally different kettle of fish. Rust isn't intended to be the universal cross platform language, and .NET / Java aren't intended for operating systems. It is interesting that some of the things people are using Rust for are the kind of things people would also use Java / .NET for. I'd not bet against it in the long run, but history tells us that there's many things that can crop up in computing to ruin a promising trajectory in a language.
BTW, thanks for writing articles!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
