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As someone who really likes C and C++ I feel like the biggest reason for me not even thinking of Rust as a viable language right now is the community attitude.

by _dcwr 9y ago

As someone who really likes C and C++ I feel like the biggest reason for me not even thinking of Rust as a viable language right now is the community attitude. It seems so damn hostile to C and C++. Anyone who thinks C and C++ is viable is a misguided idiot, bad programmer, writing unsafe software, etc. to these people. Some badass below even just said that "writing C++ code longer than a few lines without UB is humanly impossible". Apparently all these FUBAR C/C++ systems (Linux and Windows kernels, all? web browsers, LLVM that the dear rust uses, device drivers, web servers, router software, VMs of Lua, Python, C#, Java, ..., etc.) work well enough to transfer that kind of garbage to me. It's a bit like the decades old vim vs. emacs, C vs. C++, C++ vs. C# vs. Java, etc. feuds.

vvanders 9y ago
I think you see some of that since quite a few people have spent decades in C/C++(myself included) and have had exposure to experiencing these exact problems. I'm still a huge fan of C++ but Rust gets me to where I want to go with C++ with much less fuss and a lot more confidence.
- FRex 9y ago
  I'm a big fan of Python lately but neither I nor Python community at large goes "you fucking scrub, use Python, fuck you, wtf are you doing, stop making broken progs for ppl and wasting your time, omg, obsolete shit you use" and instead highlight upsides of it like readability, plentiful modules, widespread use of it, etc. Meanwhile Rust community seems full of negative advertising in the tone of "fuck C, fuck C++, Rust is safer and better, always, for everything". I see this every time Rust is brought up, without exception. Like WTF? I can understand people disliking C, C++, Lua, whatever, but not going batshit insane over them and saying you need stars to align to write a C program that isn't broken and that to write an unbroken C++ program is impossible...
  - curun1r 9y ago
    I think what you're seeing is less the Rust community and more the community of computer users that have been forced to use C/C++ software for decades now. Up until Rust, there were many easy reasons why developers could justify their choice to use C/C++. And so users had to live with the frustrations of running code written in those languages because there really were few well-known alternatives. Now Rust comes along with its safety claims (which are mostly true) and suddenly these computer users have what they believe is a legitimate complaint. They now see the frustrations with running C/C++ software as no longer facts of life but, instead, development externalities that users are forced to pay based on the decisions of the developers. And so you have a bunch of people who've likely never written much in either C/C++ or Rust who are trumpeting Rust because they're sick of dealing with CVEs, segfaults and all the other 1970s baggage that the C-cosystem imposes. And it doesn't help that C/C++ developers tend to react defensively and take the advocacy as an impugnment of their developer honor. Saying "It's only inept C/C++ developers that write code with UB or memory safety issues. Disciplined developers can write safe C code!" just infuriates people even more since the weight of evidence suggests that any non-trivial C program will eventually have a bug or vulnerability of this kind. Humans make mistakes. That's an immutable fact that we need to take into account when relying on humans to do anything. Programming is a thing that is part of that anything. To err is human, to catch as many of those mistakes as possible is the compiler's job. But I think both the Rust community and the Rust-resistant community should be wary of those trumpeting Rust who are part of neither of those groups. There are many good reasons to use Rust and some good reasons not to. Often times a hybrid Rust/C solution would be the best. We should be careful to try to take ego out of the decision making process as much as possible. And we should remember that when users are asking for Rust, what they're really asking for is an end to the pain that they've had to deal with. If it can be accomplished in some other way, then that works too.
dsacco 9y ago
For what it's worth, while I agree that there is a vocal minority within the Rust community that can be militant this way, it's not an official position, and it's explicitly not endorsed by the Rust core dev team. Personally, I'm considering C++ for a new software project despite my extensive background in security. I think Rust is a great language, I just don't have much interest in it.
steveklabnik 9y ago
In official Rust spaces, attacks like that are not allowed. We don't directly reference other languages in any official docs and such, to not promote this kind of attitude. It is true that we built Rust to address shortcomings of C and C++, some some form of crtitique has to happen. But many Rust programmers, and especially Rust leadership, will gladly say there's still some good reasons to write C and/or C++ today. Many of those reasons will still be around for a very long time.
- FRex 9y ago
  There's critique (and I have lots towards both C and C++ but nothing fits my hobby better and all libs I like are in it and I know them the best so..) and there's just being downright stupid and insulting("stars aligning to write C", "humanly impossible to write C++", etc.). In any case Rust is still solidly on my list of things to learn to become a T-shaped person with lots of insight from different angles but it's annoying to even be unable to skim through comments without seeing garbage, this doesn't happen that often, even the Java, C#, C, C++ quartet stopped going at each other's throats online a long long time ago and it's just skirmishes now and not a constant onslaught.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    I absolutely agree. Being stupid and insulting is not good, both in general and for the language. Not acknowledging other languages' successes means that we have blind spots for improvements, not to mention things like you've commented all over this thread. As others have said, I think this is more of an HN issue than anything else; you won't see this kind of discourse in Rust-centric spaces. I know that's not super helpful, but I'm not a HN moderator, so...
moomin 9y ago
Show me the programming language community that's a fan of the language it's intending to supplant and we'll talk. :)
- VHRanger 9y ago
  D has a much better attitude towards it.
- FRex 9y ago
  I've never seen Python or Lua community do that so far. But Python is its own animal (which IMO is only highlighting how good it is), it's not supplanting anything. Rust meanwhile both hates C and piggybacks on it (using LLVM, similar syntax, cited compatibility and coexistence with C). Lua is similar, no hate, its own animal, custom syntax, good in its niche (Python's niche seems to be literally everything not super performance critical BTW). Same for Erlang and Elixir, custom, different languages that are masters of their niche (and go see people gushing over these two on HN, they don't shit on other languages but say how good these are, no "Pfsshh, it's 2017, only idiot would write a reliable service in C, you can't program C ever, it's broken").
  - tspiteri 9y ago
    I've never seen Python or Lua community do that so far. Back then, wasn't it readable Python versus unreadable Perl?
    - moomin 9y ago
      You have a point. Python was definitely pitched as a perl replacement. We forget because it pretty much won. Lua has it's own problems, of course, but I don't see it as a language developed as a consequence of frustrations with another.
      - kibwen 9y ago
        Lua was developed for legal reasons: huge tariffs on foreign software meant that Brazilian companies often found it cheaper to develop custom toolchains, which is what gave us Lua.
stusmall 9y ago
I see attitude like that a lot on hacker news, but never see it on the rust user forums or IRC and rarely in rust related twitter. I can only speak for what I've seen personally but it seems to have more to say about hacker news comment sections than the rust community itself.
naasking 9y ago
> Some badass below even just said that "writing C++ code longer than a few lines without UB is humanly impossible". Apparently all these FUBAR C/C++ systems (Linux and Windows kernels, all? web browsers, LLVM that the dear rust uses, device drivers, web servers, router software, VMs of Lua, Python, C#, Java, ..., etc.) work well enough to transfer that kind of garbage to me. Yes, they work well enough, until they don't, because realistically, they are rife with dependencies on undefined behaviour. Linux can only be compiled with gcc last I checked.
thephyber 9y ago
> I feel like the biggest reason for me not even thinking of Rust as a viable language right now is the community attitude Kinda reminds me of the "coal vs. renewable energy" feud. The first tier arguments are formed around {economics, externalized costs, existing infrastructure, base load vs intermittent load} and then second-tier arguments align around {culture, history, identity, momentum, geography, political party}. You are making a second-tier argument against Rust when the article is making a first-tier argument for Rust. I would argue that you are attributing to "the Rust community" the more outrageous attitudes which are a minority of the Rust community and ignoring the majority which have much more rational and banal attitude. And likely you are attributing the inverse to the existing C/C++ attitudes towards Rust (conveniently ignoring lots of the best arguments for Rust). It's exactly what happens in those feuds you described and in modern US politics (Democrats vs. Republicans, liberals/progressives vs. conservatives, secular vs. religious, etc). By focusing on the strawman arguments, you are missing the potential benefits of using a newer generation language.
- _dcwr 9y ago
  I'm an outsider and there is a war every damn time the word Rust comes up on HN. I've yet to see bashing any language to that degree in Erlang threads, Python threads, etc. Something has to be up with that. I'm not using C and C++ professionally at all so the only place Rust has to fit in is fun or potential long term professional opportunity (assuming Rust is a fair bit more widespread than now by then, otherwise C and C++ win in the native field for employment opportunities), I'll not have fun (and I won't learn anything I don't immediately need that won't bring me fun) in a sea of vitriol against anyone who doesn't hate C and C++ so I'm happy Rust community guidelines forbid such idiocy in official spaces and documentation. Rust is apparently targeting C and C++ devs but at the same time the ones that like it are going crazy and saying stuff about C and C++ being impossible languages (I agree they are by far the most spartan and hardest in the mainstream right now but not impossible as evidenced by lots of quite reliable software written in it, some that lives depend on).
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Up until about six months ago, I saw it a lot from Haskell proponents here on HN. But with them, it was pretty much against everybody (except maybe users of F#). Either the most obnoxious ones left, or they learned that this was not a productive approach. It's been refreshingly quiet lately... But I disagree that there's a war every time Rust comes up, as a general thing. Many of the Rust proponents here are quite reasonable, willing to listen, willing to explain gently. (The conversation on the current article has gotten a bit out of hand, I'll admit.)
thephyber 9y ago
> all these FUBAR C/C++ systems (...) work well enough to transfer that kind of garbage to me I don't think you read the article. The author specifically cites lots of different types of hyperbolic "rewrite everything in Rust!" arguments and explains how this article is not that and he doesn't advocate for that. The author of the article advocates "surgically replace weaker parts but keep most of the project intact." This is exactly how Mozilla is dogfooding Rust in Firefox. And no one is arguing that all of those C/C++ systems you mention are "FUBAR" -- that's a strawman. Rust advocates, as well as advocates of many of the newer-generation, lesser-used languages advocate for advancing programming beyond the languages designed in the 1970s. We've had an explosion in programming language diversity over the past 30 years and we've developed some great research on how to prevent certain classes of defects. The longer those C/C++-written systems exist without a rewrite in a safer language (or thorough audits including massive amounts of fuzzing), the larger the impact of inevitable non-zero-probability of those vulnerabilities which Rust prevents. The article's author completely admits that at their best, C/C++ developers can avoid all of the problems that Rust solves. But not everyone is a rockstar and not everyone performs at 100% all of the time. Rust is written for humans and the compiler is a strict nanny, preventing you from getting yourself into danger, the same ways you can with C/C++ memory issues. It also has tooling for unit tests, benchmarking, fuzzing, and standardizing code formatting conventions in the language. You can bolt these things onto C/C++, but that means that you have to go find them (which new developers won't do unless sufficiently motivated to).
- _dcwr 9y ago
  The garbage I was referring to was in the comments "below". Namely: "Some people may reasonably, with some extreme care and diligence, maybe try to claim they can write safe and UB-free C code. If stars align properly" and "writing C++ code longer than a few lines without UB is humanly impossible", not the article, I quoted the latter shorter one in my original message. I consider Java browser applets unsafe trash and I'd never run one I don't absolutely trust. This person has similar (or even worse) opinion of C and C++ languages but runs tons of software in them with seemingly no problems since his idiotic comment made it in here and arrived to me intact despite all the C and C++ software on the way from him to HN to me.
Dowwie 9y ago
I came across this comment before your others. Initially, I thought you were an innocent bystander, and maybe you were, but man did that change quickly. You criticized Rust / C++ bare knuckle boxing but then immediately afterwards jumped into the ring.

by _dcwr 9y ago

vvanders 9y ago

I think you see some of that since quite a few people have spent decades in C/C++(myself included) and have had exposure to experiencing these exact problems. I'm still a huge fan of C++ but Rust gets me to where I want to go with C++ with much less fuss and a lot more confidence.

FRex 9y ago
I'm a big fan of Python lately but neither I nor Python community at large goes "you fucking scrub, use Python, fuck you, wtf are you doing, stop making broken progs for ppl and wasting your time, omg, obsolete shit you use" and instead highlight upsides of it like readability, plentiful modules, widespread use of it, etc. Meanwhile Rust community seems full of negative advertising in the tone of "fuck C, fuck C++, Rust is safer and better, always, for everything". I see this every time Rust is brought up, without exception. Like WTF? I can understand people disliking C, C++, Lua, whatever, but not going batshit insane over them and saying you need stars to align to write a C program that isn't broken and that to write an unbroken C++ program is impossible...
- curun1r 9y ago
  I think what you're seeing is less the Rust community and more the community of computer users that have been forced to use C/C++ software for decades now. Up until Rust, there were many easy reasons why developers could justify their choice to use C/C++. And so users had to live with the frustrations of running code written in those languages because there really were few well-known alternatives. Now Rust comes along with its safety claims (which are mostly true) and suddenly these computer users have what they believe is a legitimate complaint. They now see the frustrations with running C/C++ software as no longer facts of life but, instead, development externalities that users are forced to pay based on the decisions of the developers. And so you have a bunch of people who've likely never written much in either C/C++ or Rust who are trumpeting Rust because they're sick of dealing with CVEs, segfaults and all the other 1970s baggage that the C-cosystem imposes. And it doesn't help that C/C++ developers tend to react defensively and take the advocacy as an impugnment of their developer honor. Saying "It's only inept C/C++ developers that write code with UB or memory safety issues. Disciplined developers can write safe C code!" just infuriates people even more since the weight of evidence suggests that any non-trivial C program will eventually have a bug or vulnerability of this kind. Humans make mistakes. That's an immutable fact that we need to take into account when relying on humans to do anything. Programming is a thing that is part of that anything. To err is human, to catch as many of those mistakes as possible is the compiler's job. But I think both the Rust community and the Rust-resistant community should be wary of those trumpeting Rust who are part of neither of those groups. There are many good reasons to use Rust and some good reasons not to. Often times a hybrid Rust/C solution would be the best. We should be careful to try to take ego out of the decision making process as much as possible. And we should remember that when users are asking for Rust, what they're really asking for is an end to the pain that they've had to deal with. If it can be accomplished in some other way, then that works too.

dsacco 9y ago

For what it's worth, while I agree that there is a vocal minority within the Rust community that can be militant this way, it's not an official position, and it's explicitly not endorsed by the Rust core dev team. Personally, I'm considering C++ for a new software project despite my extensive background in security. I think Rust is a great language, I just don't have much interest in it.

steveklabnik 9y ago

In official Rust spaces, attacks like that are not allowed. We don't directly reference other languages in any official docs and such, to not promote this kind of attitude. It is true that we built Rust to address shortcomings of C and C++, some some form of crtitique has to happen. But many Rust programmers, and especially Rust leadership, will gladly say there's still some good reasons to write C and/or C++ today. Many of those reasons will still be around for a very long time.

FRex 9y ago
There's critique (and I have lots towards both C and C++ but nothing fits my hobby better and all libs I like are in it and I know them the best so..) and there's just being downright stupid and insulting("stars aligning to write C", "humanly impossible to write C++", etc.). In any case Rust is still solidly on my list of things to learn to become a T-shaped person with lots of insight from different angles but it's annoying to even be unable to skim through comments without seeing garbage, this doesn't happen that often, even the Java, C#, C, C++ quartet stopped going at each other's throats online a long long time ago and it's just skirmishes now and not a constant onslaught.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  I absolutely agree. Being stupid and insulting is not good, both in general and for the language. Not acknowledging other languages' successes means that we have blind spots for improvements, not to mention things like you've commented all over this thread. As others have said, I think this is more of an HN issue than anything else; you won't see this kind of discourse in Rust-centric spaces. I know that's not super helpful, but I'm not a HN moderator, so...

moomin 9y ago

Show me the programming language community that's a fan of the language it's intending to supplant and we'll talk. :)

VHRanger 9y ago
D has a much better attitude towards it.
FRex 9y ago
I've never seen Python or Lua community do that so far. But Python is its own animal (which IMO is only highlighting how good it is), it's not supplanting anything. Rust meanwhile both hates C and piggybacks on it (using LLVM, similar syntax, cited compatibility and coexistence with C). Lua is similar, no hate, its own animal, custom syntax, good in its niche (Python's niche seems to be literally everything not super performance critical BTW). Same for Erlang and Elixir, custom, different languages that are masters of their niche (and go see people gushing over these two on HN, they don't shit on other languages but say how good these are, no "Pfsshh, it's 2017, only idiot would write a reliable service in C, you can't program C ever, it's broken").
- tspiteri 9y ago
  I've never seen Python or Lua community do that so far. Back then, wasn't it readable Python versus unreadable Perl?
  - moomin 9y ago
    You have a point. Python was definitely pitched as a perl replacement. We forget because it pretty much won. Lua has it's own problems, of course, but I don't see it as a language developed as a consequence of frustrations with another.
    - kibwen 9y ago
      Lua was developed for legal reasons: huge tariffs on foreign software meant that Brazilian companies often found it cheaper to develop custom toolchains, which is what gave us Lua.

stusmall 9y ago

I see attitude like that a lot on hacker news, but never see it on the rust user forums or IRC and rarely in rust related twitter. I can only speak for what I've seen personally but it seems to have more to say about hacker news comment sections than the rust community itself.

naasking 9y ago

> Some badass below even just said that "writing C++ code longer than a few lines without UB is humanly impossible". Apparently all these FUBAR C/C++ systems (Linux and Windows kernels, all? web browsers, LLVM that the dear rust uses, device drivers, web servers, router software, VMs of Lua, Python, C#, Java, ..., etc.) work well enough to transfer that kind of garbage to me. Yes, they work well enough, until they don't, because realistically, they are rife with dependencies on undefined behaviour. Linux can only be compiled with gcc last I checked.

thephyber 9y ago

> I feel like the biggest reason for me not even thinking of Rust as a viable language right now is the community attitude Kinda reminds me of the "coal vs. renewable energy" feud. The first tier arguments are formed around {economics, externalized costs, existing infrastructure, base load vs intermittent load} and then second-tier arguments align around {culture, history, identity, momentum, geography, political party}. You are making a second-tier argument against Rust when the article is making a first-tier argument for Rust. I would argue that you are attributing to "the Rust community" the more outrageous attitudes which are a minority of the Rust community and ignoring the majority which have much more rational and banal attitude. And likely you are attributing the inverse to the existing C/C++ attitudes towards Rust (conveniently ignoring lots of the best arguments for Rust). It's exactly what happens in those feuds you described and in modern US politics (Democrats vs. Republicans, liberals/progressives vs. conservatives, secular vs. religious, etc). By focusing on the strawman arguments, you are missing the potential benefits of using a newer generation language.

_dcwr 9y ago
I'm an outsider and there is a war every damn time the word Rust comes up on HN. I've yet to see bashing any language to that degree in Erlang threads, Python threads, etc. Something has to be up with that. I'm not using C and C++ professionally at all so the only place Rust has to fit in is fun or potential long term professional opportunity (assuming Rust is a fair bit more widespread than now by then, otherwise C and C++ win in the native field for employment opportunities), I'll not have fun (and I won't learn anything I don't immediately need that won't bring me fun) in a sea of vitriol against anyone who doesn't hate C and C++ so I'm happy Rust community guidelines forbid such idiocy in official spaces and documentation. Rust is apparently targeting C and C++ devs but at the same time the ones that like it are going crazy and saying stuff about C and C++ being impossible languages (I agree they are by far the most spartan and hardest in the mainstream right now but not impossible as evidenced by lots of quite reliable software written in it, some that lives depend on).
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Up until about six months ago, I saw it a lot from Haskell proponents here on HN. But with them, it was pretty much against everybody (except maybe users of F#). Either the most obnoxious ones left, or they learned that this was not a productive approach. It's been refreshingly quiet lately... But I disagree that there's a war every time Rust comes up, as a general thing. Many of the Rust proponents here are quite reasonable, willing to listen, willing to explain gently. (The conversation on the current article has gotten a bit out of hand, I'll admit.)

thephyber 9y ago

> all these FUBAR C/C++ systems (...) work well enough to transfer that kind of garbage to me I don't think you read the article. The author specifically cites lots of different types of hyperbolic "rewrite everything in Rust!" arguments and explains how this article is not that and he doesn't advocate for that. The author of the article advocates "surgically replace weaker parts but keep most of the project intact." This is exactly how Mozilla is dogfooding Rust in Firefox. And no one is arguing that all of those C/C++ systems you mention are "FUBAR" -- that's a strawman. Rust advocates, as well as advocates of many of the newer-generation, lesser-used languages advocate for advancing programming beyond the languages designed in the 1970s. We've had an explosion in programming language diversity over the past 30 years and we've developed some great research on how to prevent certain classes of defects. The longer those C/C++-written systems exist without a rewrite in a safer language (or thorough audits including massive amounts of fuzzing), the larger the impact of inevitable non-zero-probability of those vulnerabilities which Rust prevents. The article's author completely admits that at their best, C/C++ developers can avoid all of the problems that Rust solves. But not everyone is a rockstar and not everyone performs at 100% all of the time. Rust is written for humans and the compiler is a strict nanny, preventing you from getting yourself into danger, the same ways you can with C/C++ memory issues. It also has tooling for unit tests, benchmarking, fuzzing, and standardizing code formatting conventions in the language. You can bolt these things onto C/C++, but that means that you have to go find them (which new developers won't do unless sufficiently motivated to).

_dcwr 9y ago
The garbage I was referring to was in the comments "below". Namely: "Some people may reasonably, with some extreme care and diligence, maybe try to claim they can write safe and UB-free C code. If stars align properly" and "writing C++ code longer than a few lines without UB is humanly impossible", not the article, I quoted the latter shorter one in my original message. I consider Java browser applets unsafe trash and I'd never run one I don't absolutely trust. This person has similar (or even worse) opinion of C and C++ languages but runs tons of software in them with seemingly no problems since his idiotic comment made it in here and arrived to me intact despite all the C and C++ software on the way from him to HN to me.

Dowwie 9y ago

I came across this comment before your others. Initially, I thought you were an innocent bystander, and maybe you were, but man did that change quickly. You criticized Rust / C++ bare knuckle boxing but then immediately afterwards jumped into the ring.