> the gatekeeping implied here [...] is really toxic

It's Theo de Raadt, toxic rhetoric is sort of his brand.

But... he has a real point here. It's not about grep or cat or whatever really, those are just the use cases for which OpenBSD would care.

It's that as Rust is reaching the second decade of its history, and despite some outrageous wins in press, evangelism, and general developer mindshare... Rust just hasn't made much progress in replacing exactly the software that it claims to be intended to replace!

Where are the pervasively used compression libraries in Rust? Video and audio codecs? Network stacks? Database engines? System management utilities? PKI and encryption stacks? All that stuff is still in C. After ten years of Rust success!

It's not like no one is using Rust. It's not like it doesn't have success stories (even in the categories above). But they're comparatively rare, still. There's nothing in Rust that rises to the category of "stuff everyone just uses because it's what everyone uses" (c.f. zlib, libjpeg, readline...) yet.

And if there isn't after the first decade, what needs to change to make it happen in the second. I mean, is it maybe fair to say that the window is closing for rust to take over a significant fraction the systems programming world?

It's not ten or 20 years, the first release of Rust was in 2015. Pre-1.0 Rust was a wildly different language, with green threads, segmented stacks, regular and wild breakage, not really a C replacement! Please understand this point.

But anyway here are some projects:

https://github.com/ctz/rustls a TLS library that uses https://github.com/briansmith/webpki a pki library

https://github.com/burntsushi/rust-snappy a compression library

https://github.com/tikv/tikv a database engine

https://github.com/hyperium/tonic a gRPC library

https://github.com/tock/tock an embedded OS

https://lib.rs/command-line-utilities lots of CLI utilities which include system management

You ask for "pervasively used" but this is not under control of Rust itself. It's not feasible to replace decades old setups in five years.

The most widely deployed Rust stuff is in Firefox and some Gnome libraries AFAIK.

> I mean, is it maybe fair to say that the window is closing for rust to take over a significant fraction the systems programming world?

I don't see why this should be the case.