4 ms·

Not a comment on Rust, but this sort of thinking appears strange. You hear "X is good" from 7-8 people. You dismiss these people as fans lacking objectivity.

Not a comment on Rust, but this sort of thinking appears strange. You hear "X is good" from 7-8 people. You dismiss these people as fans lacking objectivity. If you now hear "X has shortcomings" from 2-3 other people, do you now tell yourself "Yes I knew it all along. X isn't as good as the fans said it was" or do you think "Yeah, now that I have other opinions I can say that the majority of people think X is good and therefore it's probably good". If it's the first, that's just confirmation bias. If it's the second, that's better but I don't get it - why does the mere presence of a contradicting opinion make the first opinion more valid? In any case wouldn't you be better off trying X first hand and forming your own opinion?

colechristensen 7y ago
Fan is short for fanatic. Ok it's not used much like that any more. To expand what I mean, when I recall what I have seen people say on Rust, some things strike me: overwhelming positivity, lack of depth, and it-cures-all-ills. In a word, hype. I don't owe anyone my attention to do some determination about how valid this or any other hype is. If I hear people talking about something and the loudest and most numerous voices are hype, I think it is fair and rational to have a solid doubtful bias much moreso than if conversation seemed more varied, substantial, and rational. Things that attract more rational people than hype-r people correlate with quality.
- rcxdude 7y ago
  Similarly though, those that are hyped about something are more likely to speak louder than those who are just interested in using it. Looking from the outside you are likely to get a very biased sample.
- nindalf 7y ago
  If you haven't heard criticisms of Rust, you haven't heard very much of Rust. If you give it more than a superficial glance, you will find that there are issues with Rust - build times, build artifact sizes, ability to integrate with non-cargo build systems, cross-platform compatibility, difficulty in finding developers proficient in Rust, time to train engineers new to Rust, FFI with C++ not being good and on and on. Even the very article we're discussing is by a person who is unhappy with the FFI experience and wants to improve it to unlock contributions to Linux. What makes people excited about Rust is not that it's perfect right now, nor do people claim that it's perfect. They're excited because they've seen a lot of progress in the last 3 years and see a clear path for it to become better in the next 3. Almost every blog post I've read mentions shortcomings. Take one I read today from way back in 2017 (showing that people criticising Rust is not new) - https://onesignal.com/blog/rust-at-onesignal/ https://onesignal.com/blog/rust-at-onesignal/. While they are very happy with their choice, they mention 1. Build times being very long. This is partly the fault of rustc generating verbose LLVM IR and partly because of code-gen macros like the ones used by serde (the crate that makes json parsing easy) 2. Libraries such as async clients for postgres and redis not being available. Http clients being immature and having to spend time improving them. 3. IDE experience being poor. Of course, 2.5 years later many of these issues are no longer true. * Build times have improved a 8-30% depending on the project in 2019 (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2019/07/25/the-rust-compiler-is-still-getting-faster/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2019/07/25/the-rust-com...). Incremental builds are a thing now, as are check builds (they generate no artifact, just make sure your code is compilable). * Many more libraries available. Certainly all the basics will be covered once async-await becomes stable and all network libraries add support for it. * RLS is reasonably good, IntelliJ-Rust is better and rust-analyzer is being worked on. Current situation is much better than the days of using Racer and will likely improve within 2 years when rust-analyzer is mature. So there you go - an example of a Rust "fan" pointing out it's shortcomings 2.5 years ago, and the ways in which Rust has improved since then. If your issue is that you see Rust being mentioned by fans a lot, it's likely because we keep reading stories about vulnerabilities that happen over and over, issues that wouldn't exist in a Rust code base. If these vulnerabilities were less common, maybe we wouldn't see Rust being mentioned so much.
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  The dichotomy between hyped and rational people is kind of artificial though. And in a crowd, the most loud echo will always be the hype. There are bad projects with a lot of hype, bad projects with little hype, good project with little hype and good project with a big hype. Hype just isn't a good proxy for quality. But hype is often a good proxy for success though: no matter how good your product/techno is, it's going to fail if there is no traction. Overall, if you think a product is good, it's good news if there is hype about it also. (And I think it's exactly what's happening with Rust: a good tool with a good amount of traction. But yeah, fanatics are always boring)
gmueckl 7y ago
Usually, when something is being oberly hyped by too many people, it means that they are falling victim to good marketing and the actual improvements are mediocre at best. A real, honest improvement comes only when there are clearly communicated downsides and it is obvious that their impact is tolerable. Rust fanboyism is like git fanboyism in that they claim having the one true solution. It didn't hold for git, so being cautious and jaded is the right attitude at this point.

colechristensen 7y ago

Fan is short for fanatic. Ok it's not used much like that any more. To expand what I mean, when I recall what I have seen people say on Rust, some things strike me: overwhelming positivity, lack of depth, and it-cures-all-ills. In a word, hype. I don't owe anyone my attention to do some determination about how valid this or any other hype is. If I hear people talking about something and the loudest and most numerous voices are hype, I think it is fair and rational to have a solid doubtful bias much moreso than if conversation seemed more varied, substantial, and rational. Things that attract more rational people than hype-r people correlate with quality.

rcxdude 7y ago
Similarly though, those that are hyped about something are more likely to speak louder than those who are just interested in using it. Looking from the outside you are likely to get a very biased sample.
nindalf 7y ago
If you haven't heard criticisms of Rust, you haven't heard very much of Rust. If you give it more than a superficial glance, you will find that there are issues with Rust - build times, build artifact sizes, ability to integrate with non-cargo build systems, cross-platform compatibility, difficulty in finding developers proficient in Rust, time to train engineers new to Rust, FFI with C++ not being good and on and on. Even the very article we're discussing is by a person who is unhappy with the FFI experience and wants to improve it to unlock contributions to Linux. What makes people excited about Rust is not that it's perfect right now, nor do people claim that it's perfect. They're excited because they've seen a lot of progress in the last 3 years and see a clear path for it to become better in the next 3. Almost every blog post I've read mentions shortcomings. Take one I read today from way back in 2017 (showing that people criticising Rust is not new) - https://onesignal.com/blog/rust-at-onesignal/ https://onesignal.com/blog/rust-at-onesignal/. While they are very happy with their choice, they mention 1. Build times being very long. This is partly the fault of rustc generating verbose LLVM IR and partly because of code-gen macros like the ones used by serde (the crate that makes json parsing easy) 2. Libraries such as async clients for postgres and redis not being available. Http clients being immature and having to spend time improving them. 3. IDE experience being poor. Of course, 2.5 years later many of these issues are no longer true. * Build times have improved a 8-30% depending on the project in 2019 (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2019/07/25/the-rust-compiler-is-still-getting-faster/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2019/07/25/the-rust-com...). Incremental builds are a thing now, as are check builds (they generate no artifact, just make sure your code is compilable). * Many more libraries available. Certainly all the basics will be covered once async-await becomes stable and all network libraries add support for it. * RLS is reasonably good, IntelliJ-Rust is better and rust-analyzer is being worked on. Current situation is much better than the days of using Racer and will likely improve within 2 years when rust-analyzer is mature. So there you go - an example of a Rust "fan" pointing out it's shortcomings 2.5 years ago, and the ways in which Rust has improved since then. If your issue is that you see Rust being mentioned by fans a lot, it's likely because we keep reading stories about vulnerabilities that happen over and over, issues that wouldn't exist in a Rust code base. If these vulnerabilities were less common, maybe we wouldn't see Rust being mentioned so much.
littlestymaar 7y ago
The dichotomy between hyped and rational people is kind of artificial though. And in a crowd, the most loud echo will always be the hype. There are bad projects with a lot of hype, bad projects with little hype, good project with little hype and good project with a big hype. Hype just isn't a good proxy for quality. But hype is often a good proxy for success though: no matter how good your product/techno is, it's going to fail if there is no traction. Overall, if you think a product is good, it's good news if there is hype about it also. (And I think it's exactly what's happening with Rust: a good tool with a good amount of traction. But yeah, fanatics are always boring)

gmueckl 7y ago

Usually, when something is being oberly hyped by too many people, it means that they are falling victim to good marketing and the actual improvements are mediocre at best. A real, honest improvement comes only when there are clearly communicated downsides and it is obvious that their impact is tolerable. Rust fanboyism is like git fanboyism in that they claim having the one true solution. It didn't hold for git, so being cautious and jaded is the right attitude at this point.