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I notice the same thing happen with other languages on HN. What I find interesting is that Rust seems to always get some variation of the comment: “why is this

I notice the same thing happen with other languages on HN. What I find interesting is that Rust seems to always get some variation of the comment: “why is this interesting, this has already been done in other languages”. I don’t know why the hate, but I would say HN is a community with a lot of developers, and if things are getting voted up, it’s because many of the folks on here might have enjoyed seeing the post/article/project.

dirtydroog 6y ago
Because porting to another langugage is rarely interesting unless there's a performance or resource usage win. For example, if all of wc, ls, grep etc were ported to Rust and they ran far more quickly, that'd be post worthy. Someone compiled linux with a C++ compiler a few months ago and the compiler found a few bugs. That was interesting and useful. https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/4/1/116 https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/4/1/116
- Nvorzula 6y ago
  Of course there is academic interesting (as in, I wrote an emulator in BASH and it actually kinda works) and there is practical interesting (I got the emulator to be 3% faster). The Rust community really has an interest in showing the world that it is a serious candidate to replace C++. That's why we see a preponderance of "this same problem, but solved in Rust" - they're providing another data point to show that Rust can work in a problem space that had previously been the sole domain of C/C++. In that regard, I would think it interesting.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Case in point, had I not had the fortune of having access to Native Oberon during the university, I would also be an anti-GC voice. Instead I learned what Oberon allowed me to do, got to dive into the history of programming language research at Xerox PARC, and became a firm believer in GC enabled systems programming languages. Programming languages landscape lacks dreamers like Alan Kay or Jobs, apparently many only believe in stuff that is demoed in front of them and even if proven wrong, they only care if they can take immediate profit from it and not 5 years down the road.
- hamandcheese 6y ago
  I think ports to other languages are interesting even if there aren’t practical performance gains. Rust is cool. Other languages are cool too. X, but in Y is cool, at least cool enough to glance at.

dirtydroog 6y ago

Because porting to another langugage is rarely interesting unless there's a performance or resource usage win. For example, if all of wc, ls, grep etc were ported to Rust and they ran far more quickly, that'd be post worthy. Someone compiled linux with a C++ compiler a few months ago and the compiler found a few bugs. That was interesting and useful. https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/4/1/116 https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/4/1/116

Nvorzula 6y ago
Of course there is academic interesting (as in, I wrote an emulator in BASH and it actually kinda works) and there is practical interesting (I got the emulator to be 3% faster). The Rust community really has an interest in showing the world that it is a serious candidate to replace C++. That's why we see a preponderance of "this same problem, but solved in Rust" - they're providing another data point to show that Rust can work in a problem space that had previously been the sole domain of C/C++. In that regard, I would think it interesting.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Case in point, had I not had the fortune of having access to Native Oberon during the university, I would also be an anti-GC voice. Instead I learned what Oberon allowed me to do, got to dive into the history of programming language research at Xerox PARC, and became a firm believer in GC enabled systems programming languages. Programming languages landscape lacks dreamers like Alan Kay or Jobs, apparently many only believe in stuff that is demoed in front of them and even if proven wrong, they only care if they can take immediate profit from it and not 5 years down the road.
hamandcheese 6y ago
I think ports to other languages are interesting even if there aren’t practical performance gains. Rust is cool. Other languages are cool too. X, but in Y is cool, at least cool enough to glance at.