Learning rust is hard, yeah. But I’ve found that once you get the hang of it, actually using rust and writing code day to day is as fast or faster than using other languages (Jacascript, Pythong, etc). Rust tells you exactly what you did wrong and why it’s dangerous, this is incredibly useful in avoiding bugs and speeds up productivity. Therefore, I have doubt the main creators of Lemmy have issues with writing rust code.
I agree that finding developers can be hard, though. Especially since rust is still a relatively new language. I also agree that new programmers who recently came to lemmy and want to help it succeed by contributing code will take a good bit of time to get to that point of ‘being comfortable enough with rust that it increases productivity’. However, I also think we have to consider the inverse, that the influx of new users will also see experienced rust programmers who want to help contribute to Lemmy and be successful at it (and in fact I think we’ve already seen this if I take Lemmy PR activity as any indication). Indeed even the rust subreddit stickied protest post hinted that rust developers are among the few who can help enact new alternative platforms to Reddit, and there are definitely OG and amazing programmers in that community.
That’s also not mentioning that rust has continued to gain traction and is continually one of the most favorite languages for devs (according to stackoverflow)
TL;DR: I’m a rust optimist and have faith in the rust community to help out Lemmy where it matters.
Source: been rust dev for 4+ years, do it for day job. Also considering helping out Lemmy when my life becomes a little bit less crazy
Lemmyrs/rustlang for rust instance btw
Preach