> but what I mean by that is pretty much what a normal non-technical person would consider an useful piece of software

That seems like an... interesting... definition of "useful" to me. Why that definition?

> Photoshop, Figma, Excel, Chrome, Windows, Android, Blender, AutoCAD, Unreal Engine, any Office Suite...

To be fair, there is Rust in Windows and Android, and IIRC there's movement towards using it in Chrome as well.

> It would be a stretch to put any of the tool on either of those lists.

OK, but your second list has a different set of qualifications than the first. You originally just asked for "useful" programs, and that's what you asked for in the original comment I responded to. Now it's "very technically impressive". So which do you want?

I feel like it's probably not a bad idea to ask exactly what you mean by "technically impressive" as well, since I think it's hard to argue that ripgrep and polars don't at least have technically impressive parts in them.

> Given the popularity of Rust, and that it's now over 10 years old, I'd expect at least one major program that can serve as an example of "here's this very useful, complex software package, as proof that our methodology works and you can do cool things this way."

That seems like a bit of a questionable metric to me.

Given that Rust was explicitly designed and intended to be incrementally adoptable in existing codebases, it doesn't make sense to me to solely look for standalone programs since incremental adoption is very much part of "our methodology". This also sort of ties into your expectation in the first place - I'm not sure I'd expect the same given Rust's design and niche, as well as the general software landscape now vs. when C/C++ were a similar age.