The Rust zealots I've noticed tend to have just very recently encountered the language. The developers who use it in production systems and in non-trivial applications tend to have a more mellow opinion lacking hype or whatever.<p>I use it during the work week and it solves a lot of problems and the ecosystem is maturing very quickly. Serde is by far the biggest boon of the language. It is truly state of the art as far as serialisation goes. I also agree with the writer about it not being hard. It's hard in the same way Erlang is hard, it just doesn't operate the way C-like languages conventionally do, though there are some similarities. The borrow checker is pretty easy to wrap your head around once you program more with it.<p>Overall its a good language. Not perfect, and I'm sure in the future we'll see some better languages, but for what it presents, it's as good of a tool as you'll get in some domains.
I'm pretty in the dark about [new thing]. I don't have skills in it and really don't grok it. And even though it seldom gets mentioned, my insecurity about that gap in my knowledge -- that thing that makes my existing knowledge a little bit obsolete -- makes me laser focused on those instances where it does appear (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon of sorts): If one in a hundred posts mentions [new thing], I'll throw my hands up and complain about how these hipsters are trying to push this stuff down my throat at every venue. Maybe I'll no true scotsman in a futile effort to try to coerce people against talking about it, for instance by claiming that real pros don't actually talk about it at all, Fight Club style.<p>This has played out over, and over, and over again. Blockchain, NoSQL, JavaScript, Angular, "web3", Android, iOS, Swift, K8s, and on and on. Legitimate criticism gets drown out by people just fearful that something might take hold and then they're going to have to change how they do things or learn something new.<p>Eh.
As a security guy, I'd much rather hear from the Rust "zealots" and all their Rust "hype" all day long than hear about yet another memory corruption vulnerability in software used by millions.
Rust evangelism is one of the cleaner examples of people absorbing a technology as an element of personal identity . You have all the hallmarks:<p>- rhetoric taking on levels of hostile zealotry like the linked post<p>- aggressive insertion of the topic in conversations where it is inappropriate<p>- inability or resistance to recognizing faults<p>For another modern example of technology as crusade, see "the blockchain".<p>It's just a programming language. It doesn't seem like a great sign that this is the type of language emerging as acceptable from a community.
Stop whining about whining about Rust hype.<p>We <i>don't need to know</i> that your new shell / grep / text editor is coded in Rust. If it's good, it's good for other reasons, and those reasons are certain to be overwhelmingly more interesting. If it's bad, it's just bad, and that won't save it. We especially don't need to know <i>in the title</i>.<p>We <i>especially</i> don't need to know your (embarrassingly outdated) opinions about other languages. Those just invite us to point out your mistakes, which will tend to distract readers from what would surely have been deserved admiration for your work.<p>There is no harm in mentioning implementation languages in the bit at the end where you invite people to send patches, for what ought to be the one obvious reason. [Edit: an announcement about a library clearly needs to mention who can use it.]
Stop invading spaces used by language x, evangelizing that x sucks and Rust is what everyone must switch to if you don't want users of language x to think you're a bunch of arrogant asses.
Rust could have been a great systems programming language. Unfortunately, it has been taken over by web developers. All systems programming jobs are still in C/C++.<p>It could have been different if Mozilla hadn't rewritten all of Firefox in Rust while complaining about C++. Firefox dropped from 10% of the web to 3% and into irrelevance during that Rust rewrite and gained nothing. Ironically, Chrome is written in C++ and ate their lunch from Firefox's plate.
I really don't know why people need to get so defensive about programming languages. I'm generally happy to live and let live and I really don't think languages matter very much. But when it comes to Rust people, there is a special kind of obnoxiousness among their community. The do tend to come along uninvited into non-Rust spaces and evangelise, and it is kind of grating.
>Do you remember when Java was the hot new thing? No, probably not. You’re probably too young.<p>I do. But no one hyped Java as the Silver Bullet or the Holy Grail. There were many known trade offs. ( Performance, GC, Memory usage etc ) And we were allowed to discuss those trade offs.<p>I never read anyone actually disapprove Rust for its absolute ability to provide memory safety. Nor any inherent distaste for Rust. It may be a difficult language to grasp, but that is about it in terms of negativity.<p>But when Rust Evangelism StrikeForce demands every single piece of new software to be written in Rust otherwise they are deemed unsafe. One have to question whether any additional Rust hype ( at the time when RESF were still active ) is simply adding fuel to fire, without also adding some balanced view on draw backs.<p>Technology evangelist, despite my hatred against the term as it should simply be "marketing", is somewhat a necessary evil in order to gain traction and critical mass. But the key word here is critical mass, not world domination, unless you are a marketing and PR genius like Steve Jobs.
Wow, this article is probably one of the best non-technical arguments against Rust I've ever read.<p>Thankfully most of the Rust enthusiasts are not like this one at all.
The problem occurs when I arrive on a landing page for a project re-invented in Rust that advertises not encountering double frees as a feature of the project. I notice the project is nothing more than a build tool for web development, and I just shake my head.
I've dabbled in rust and it's been good but I've never progressed further than just modifying existing codebases.<p>I've yet to find a good toolkit/framework that helps me build web apps. I stick to JavaScript merely because it's a language that allows me to do most of what I want, in a tolerable way, in most situations, on both the client and server.<p>But, I know the problems with it. And there are a lot.<p>Is there a toolkit for building web apps that has the ergonomics of something like Svelte? Or, at least is a toolkit that radically simplifies building things in the client with wasm?<p>Until I find that, I'm just going to stick with JavaScript, only because it's more important for me to ship quick prototypes than build something perfect before I know what that is.
There is this phenomenon, when people confuse upgrade over previous iterations, with the hottest shit ever.<p>I think this has happened with Java style OOP. It came in existence to fix some things, became "the way to do programming", but honeymoon is over now.<p>We might see it happening now with gradual typing. Dynamically typed languages are being upgraded with some static typing, and you can see comments popping on HN how this is actually the best way of writing programs.<p>Rust is in this category and a dose of skepticism is always welcomed.
> Rust is “hard”. (It’s not, by the way. It’s not hard. It’s truly not.)<p>As someone who likes Rust, it takes days or weeks to wrap your head around the borrow checker, and "spaghetti object graph" code patterns in other languages don't transfer well to Rust (Cell<i32> is more awkward to use than C++ int, and RefCell introduces runtime panics). I've had the misfortune of dealing with code written in <i>unsound unsafe Rust</i> which freely converts aliased raw pointers into &mut, even when they likely conflict with other & or &mut. I still don't know how to rewrite it in safe Rust.<p>Rust is built around making mutable multiple ownership awkward. This is fine (and often results in more understandable code) when you're working in single-ownership code conceived and built around Rust, but when you're using something like gtk-rs (which binds to a C framework built around reference counting and cyclic parent pointers), Rust makes mutating shared state awkward (adding extra state alongside GTK widgets requires RefCell or similar), and reference-counted callbacks awkward (the clone! macro breaks rustfmt).<p>> Nobody thinks you’re smarter or better because you can remember all the pitfalls.<p>Oh, I know some people who think that way. Personally I think Rust teaches you the same things as C++ code (reasoning about state, knowing what parts of your code reference an object, knowing when to free an object).<p>> Soon your solution won’t be faster to market, and will be more expensive to maintain to boot. And someone’s going to eat your lunch while you complain.<p>There's no Rust GUI framework as comprehensive and mature as Qt. (Then again, there's no C++ GUI framework as clean, usable, and stable as Qt should've been. And people are moving to web UIs.) And some (not all) Rust libraries are amateurish from people who don't know what they're doing; for example, <a href="https://lib.rs/crates/samplerate" rel="nofollow">https://lib.rs/crates/samplerate</a> allocates on every conversion (which isn't safe for real-time audio generation) rather than writing into a preallocated &mut buffer. <a href="https://docs.rs/hound/latest/hound/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.rs/hound/latest/hound/</a> is a WAV file reader which branches on every sample (IDK if it gets optimized out), rather than performing error checking at file open time and bounds checking once per block, which feels bizarre to me.<p>Re. "An ability to compensate for the shitty state of technology" that exists today isn’t some kind of a competitive “moat”.", writing your own bindings to C code, or performing unsafe C calls directly, instead of using the ergonomic libraries which don't work properly, <i>is</i> compensating for shitty technology.<p>IMO this article comes pretty close to flamebait and trolling.
Maybe someday I’ll write an Earley parser in rust to figure it out (and I like writing Earley parsers and not actually using them).<p>What gets my goat is people saying it is a <i>crime against humanity</i> to write code in C++ instead of rust because reasons.