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Facebook Is Shuttering the Parse Developer Platform (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: In a blog post yesterday, Facebook announced it is shutting down the Parse developer platform as of Jan. 28, 2017, giving developers a year to move off its hosted services. This comes as a bit of a surprise, considering that just last month, Parse launched a set of new tools to help developers work with Apple's watchOS and tvOS last, and at the time, Parse Product Manager Supratik Lahiri promised more updates in the future. Developers who don't want to rewrite their applications to work with a new back-end service provider can follow a migration guide from Parse to make their applications work with an independent MongoDB instance and a new open-source Parse Server that's running on Salesforce-owned developer platform provider Heroku.
over-reaction. They're giving a migration path that basically lets you run it self-hosted.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I find it very interesting that you mention Rust! Although it's a programming language, you're absolutely right, it could very well put its users in the same awful situation that Parse's users now find themselves in.
Rust is a product of Mozilla, which as we know has had some tough times lately. They lost their Google sponsorship, and have had to settle for Yahoo instead. Users are fleeing Firefox left and right, and Firefox is pretty much the only product of Mozilla's that still has some users. Firefox now likely has a market share within the single-digit percentages. Once its users are gone, Mozilla's influence will wane significantly. It does not help that pretty much all of their other products have either been put on ice (Thunderbird), are considered obsolete (Bugzilla), have failed (Persona, Firefox OS), or are making little progress (Servo).
Some will claim that Rust is an "open source project", but I'm not convinced that's true. Rather, I think it's a Mozilla project with source code that's publicly available. Maybe they'll take contributions from outsiders, but it's people from Mozilla calling the shots and controlling the project. If it weren't for Mozilla pushing it forward, I don't think we'd see much real progress at all.
It does not help that many in the Rust community, including some prominent members, are former Ruby on Railers who fled that community when the hype started to die down after people realized how problematic Ruby and Ruby on Rails can be. If these people fled the Ruby community so quickly, what's to say they won't do the same to Rust when its hype disappears? We're already seeing the Rust hype start to die down, now that 1.0 was finally released (after many delays), and users are finding out that it isn't as useful as it's claimed it was.
Then there are the issues of Rust having only a single implementation, with no others on the horizon. There's also the issue of Rust libraries having a tendency to go unmaintained after the sole contributor loses interest and abandons the project. Many Rust libraries are just shitty weekend project code dumps to GitHub, so it's not like they were ever even real projects in any sense to start with.
It just makes so much more sense to go with C++ than it does to use Rust. C++14, and the upcoming C++17, have revolutionized the language. They give just about the same degree of safety as Rust, but without all of the problems of Rust. Best of all, there are multiple independent implementations from separate vendors, so even if say the GCC project were to fail, there would still be Clang and several proprietary implementations to choose from.
Rust sounds good on the surface, but it leaves me very uneasy. I don't think it's worth considering until there are multiple production-grade implementations of it. Even then, we need to see its community mature, and the library situation vastly improve. That will take many years to happen, at which point we'll likely see C++ offering all of the functionality that Rust offers, plus many other benefits, all coming from a mature and reliable community with a diverse set of players.
C++ is the future. Rust is not.