The amount of hype Rust is getting is not going to end well for Rust. This reminds me of Ruby during 2007-2010 where it went from Patron Saint to Scapegoat for every startup that failed using it. Ruby survived it, and I'm sure Rust will too, but that doesn't make it obnoxious for everyone else who inevitably gets swept up in the craze and crash.<p>Programming is hard. Programming will always be hard. Better/newer tools (and sometimes influences from the old finally making it mainstream, like Standard ML) make programming easier but not fool proof. It's misleading and harmful to hype the crap out of any language.<p>Unfortunately this stupidity is never going to end as long as language creators measure language success in adoption numbers and TIOBE scores rather than the warm fuzzy feeling of handling certain people's needs really, really well.
Captain Obvious here with a public service announcement:<p>Rust's safety guarantees dont extend to logic or protocol implementation problems or misconfigured security settings.the part of the article about service providers leaking creds or other info...Rust all the things and that will still happen.<p>Some of this stuff is just too much. Also, why not work on lifetime and memory safety in a c based language? Rust looks like Klingon to me. functional-ish-ness is really hot right now. (Like Hansel.)<p>There's this really sophomoric theme that this seems to be a part of that keeps resurfacing here. its almost like a conspiracy of influences made the wrong tech choice in the past and everything would be ok now if we used X. Where X could be haskell, rust, os2, plan 9, lisp, lisp, lisp, go...theres quite a few saviors out there they resurface every now and again.
The best defense is a good offense. What is scaring all of the Rust developers and users so badly that they feel the need to go on such an offensive hype campaign?<p>It's worse than the phase Java went through when it hit its peak.<p>I'll be honest. Until we start seeing some more balanced (frankly, I'd settle for nuanced) discussion about the compromises made to get Rust's strengths, I'm staying the hell away from it.
Rust is an overly complicated language that made the exact same deadly mistakes that c++ made: takes too long to compile and is too complex.
Yes I get it, you're working on the compile times. You will never bring them down to under 1 second regardless of amount of libraries used, let's just say this once and for all. I add two crates 'hyper' and 'postgres-rs' in a 500 line(!!!) program and it's STILL a 2.8 second compile time. Imagine if I actually use Rust for real software and have 500k lines of code.
I'm putting my hopes on Jonathan Blow's Jai language.
Rust has great potential to be a better tool for C and C++'s niches, and we're all rooting for it, but for those tasks where a type-safe GC'd pure functional language can be used, well, they still should be.
The reality is Rust will never be mainstream because 95% of the dev use php / ruby / python / java / c# and Rust is far too complicated to switch from those. That's where imo Go will prevail, it's a simpler language that is easy to use / learn.
That's a lot of hype.<p>I don't hate C, like some here, but I am receptive to the many objections to it: it makes a lot of sense.<p>But I would be a lot more receptive to this particular attack on C (which is pretty reasonable) if it wasn't so melodramatic: claiming that Rust will "save software" and that C is some kind of garbage with no advantages of any sort. Both are false (although the latter has some truth to it: C has many issues).<p>The truth is strongly in your favour: No need to stretch it.
> A world where complete system crashes in software are as rare as car crashes<p>A hilariously wrong/misleading analogy in an otherwise compelling and agreeable blog post.
Even Rust folks disagree with the title of the post: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5kytg5/rust_is_softwares_salvation/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5kytg5/rust_is_softwa...</a>
This may be wishful thinking, but to echo Alan Kay, I have been hoping that with the stalling of Moore's law we'd start being a little more thoughtful about the instruction set architecture (like the B5000) so that we can do safe and performant things in higher-level languages.<p>I like Rust. I just don't think doing things in a better C than C is going to yield as much of a payoff as these guys think it will.
All of us who get the compiler writing bug make a toy language or two, I know I did, way more than two, usually it was taking some great idea and running with it .... there is a basic problem that there's a lot more aspiring compiler writers than there is public mindshare for learning new languages .... for every new language you see blooming there's 20 that didn't get the attention to get more than 2 adherents, and for every adopted language being commonly used there's another 10 of those new blooming languages that will blaze and die .... only to have its one great idea find its way into C++ 5 years from now.<p>I don't write new languages any more, I figured this out 20 years ago, it's something that is very very hard to suceed at, and rather a crap shoot.<p>The same goes for OSs.<p>Oh, and BTW, functional languages, the very best thing since sliced bread, for, what? the third time around now?
> Better concurrency than C++<p>That's... not saying all that much.<p>> Better performance than C<p>In 2014? Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.<p>About problems with C:<p>> Maybe a bug in GCC outputted the wrong machine code<p>And Rust compilers will never have bugs?<p>> Maybe a race condition in Linux gave an unprivileged process the ability to tamper with your program<p>And writing your program in Rust is going to save you? Nope.<p>Now, in the previous two points, the claim may be that GCC/Linux is written in C, rather than that my program is written in C. But a compiler written in Rust can still output the wrong machine code, and the borrow checker won't save you.
<i>> Problems with C:<p>> [ ... ]<p>> Maybe a bug in GCC outputted [sic] the wrong machine code</i><p>How does Rust protect against a bug in Rust outputting the wrong machine code?<p>> <i>Maybe a race condition in Linux gave an unprivileged process the ability to tamper with your program</i><p>Too bad the race-condition free Rust OS that can replace Linux isn't here yet.