I See a Future in Jj

Summary

I see a future in jj Oct 22, 2025 In December of 2012, I was home for Christmas, reading Hacker News. And that’s when I saw “Rust 0.5 released."" I’m a big fan of programming languages, so I decided to check it out. At the time, I was working on Ruby and Rails, but in college, I had wanted to focus on compilers, and my friends were all very much into systems stuff. So I decided to give Rust a try. And I liked it! But, for other reasons I won’t get into here, I was thinking about a lot of things in that moment. I was looking to shake things up a bit. So I asked myself: is Rust going to be A Thing? Why I chose Rust So, I thought about it. What does a programming language need to be successful? It needs some sort of market fit. It needs to have people willing to work on it, as bringing a new language into the world is a lot of work. And it needs users. When I considered all of these things, here’s what I saw with Rust: Market fit: there was basically no credible alternatives to C and C++. I had been involved in the D community a bit, but it was clear that it wasn’t going to take off. Go was a few years old, and hit 1.0 earlier that year, but for the kinds of work that C and C++ are uniquely able to do, I saw the same problem that I did with D: garbage collection. This doesn’t mean Go isn’t a good language, or that it’s not popular, but I didn’t see it as being able to credibly challenge C and C++ in their strongholds. Rust, on the other hand, had a novel approach to these problems: memory safety without garbage collection. Now, I also need to mention that Rust back in those days was much closer to Go than it even is today, but again, I had just learned about it for a few hours, I didn’t really have a deep understanding of it yet. If I had, I actually might have also dismissed it as well, as it wasn’t really GC that was the issue, but a significant runtime. But again: I hadn’t really come to that understanding yet. Point is: low-level programming was a space where there...