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It’s a cult, but you don’t have to join the cult. I use Rust both privately and more and more frequently professionally and I don’t really notice the cult commu

by devjab 2y ago

It’s a cult, but you don’t have to join the cult. I use Rust both privately and more and more frequently professionally and I don’t really notice the cult community outside of smiling at it once in a while when it blows up on HN. We’re mostly adopting rust to replace our C, to protect us from ourselves. It’s just so much easier to hand off these sort of projects to developers who mainly work with things like Java or C#. Partly because of the memory “safety” but also because things like enums work the way they expect them to being sum types, and so on. It’s also very clear when something is intended not to be mutable. The borrow checker is probably the biggest struggle, where with C, everything is a struggle. Rust still has a long way to come though, and maybe it’ll never get there. I do think we’ll see an uptake as performance increasingly matters due to cloud costs and ESG. Right now though, I’d argue that unless you know why you “want” to use Rust then maybe you shouldn’t.

pdimitar 2y ago
Mostly agreed with your comment though I still have to remark that every community has zealots and it's mystifying to me why are people so annoyed by Rust's. So it's hard to agree that "Rust is a cult". As you said, it's a pragmatic but also kinda niche language. I don't reach for it unless I can't do the job with others, easier and quicker to work with languages.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  The C sphere is actually refreshingly free of zealotry (mainly I guess because there isn't such a thing as a "C community" and even despite C being the main attack target of language zealots - funny enough nobody complains about those pesky assembly coders and their hippie attitude towards memory safety lol). The "religious zeal" was also an important reason why I switched back to C from C++ and why I don't have much interest in Rust. I can't quite stand the "holier than thou" attitude in.parts of those communities.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    > This was an important reason why I switched back to C from C++ and why I don't have much interest in Rust. I can't quite stand the the "holier than thou" attitude in.parts of those communities. This is 100% baffling to me. Let me explain. 1. Every single area has zealots. Yours included. And we're not talking only work. Every hobby area as well. 2. What the attitude of the most toxic 0.1% of the users of a thing is has exactly ZERO correlation with whether the thing is good and worth using. 3. By resisting only those 0.1% toxic zealots you are only demonstrating meaningless rebelliousness. As a supposed adult you should be immune to what are people hyping up and form your own opinion. INFORMED opinion. Not one based on the "many people praise it hence I, the intellectual, will stay far away from that obvious nonsense" stance. 4. Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, Rust is praised because it's actually good? Have you considered that the Rust community is not trying to cheat its way into your heart, and that the love Rust gets is justified by the people who need its features? Seems like you did not, and that's disappointing. In other words, I have zero clue of your thought process here, maybe you can help me understand? Back in my home town the VW Golf had an ardent fan base, yet one of my friends still bought one after he graduated. He didn't call the people who loved VW Golf zealots. He did his research and concluded that with his budget and mechanic skills the VW Golf is the ideal option. Food for thought?
    - nottorp 2y ago
      In Europe (esp Eastern), if you take resale price into account you have to get a german car because everything else loses value faster :) The VWs you can just dump on the fans. I know, I live in a similar country.
      - pdimitar 2y ago
        The point is that the guy who was bombarded by feedback that VW Golf is good did not go out of his way to avoid buying it. He did his own research, formed his own informed opinion, and didn't go against the grain due to misguided notions. Wink wink.
        jstimpfle 2y ago
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Are you sure? The C sphere overlaps with the UNIX one, for obvious reasons.
    - flohofwoe 2y ago
      I can't remember Linux zealots raving irrationally about C though (although when googling I'm sure something will come up). Topics like Wayland or systemd on the other hand, oh my...
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        I said UNIX culture, not Linux. Diving into the ruins of Usenet, or UNIX/C literature, will provide enough examples.
      - pdimitar 2y ago
        They are alive and well in this sub-thread of mine, quite a lot of them even. :) Down-voting and never engaging because who wants their bias challenged?
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  > ... every community has zealots and it's mystifying to me why are people so annoyed by Rust's. Because they're the ones that we keep hearing from right now. When it was the Haskell zealots showing up every few days, they were annoying. When it was the Lisp zealots, they were annoying.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    Right now? Like where? Be specific and use arguments and not feelings.
CrimsonCape 2y ago
I saw your comment on an older C# thread in which you said (paraphrased) that C# is not bad, has nothing really stellar, and is just kind of bland. If you could theoretically swap out the entire back-end of a programming language, and hypothetically you did that to C# by allowing developers to write C# styling and syntax that could be compiled to Rust, it would probably not be a big loss. The type primitives would be an apples-apples comparison at best, or "Rust is just better" if you really scrutinized the types closely. Where does that leave the rest of the language? A better regex implementation? Rust would probably win. A better GUI experience? Rust is speedily approaching usable APIs there at the same time Microsoft is trying to sunset the best they had. I wonder if F# could be rebased on top of Rust...

by devjab 2y ago

pdimitar 2y ago

Mostly agreed with your comment though I still have to remark that every community has zealots and it's mystifying to me why are people so annoyed by Rust's. So it's hard to agree that "Rust is a cult". As you said, it's a pragmatic but also kinda niche language. I don't reach for it unless I can't do the job with others, easier and quicker to work with languages.

flohofwoe 2y ago
The C sphere is actually refreshingly free of zealotry (mainly I guess because there isn't such a thing as a "C community" and even despite C being the main attack target of language zealots - funny enough nobody complains about those pesky assembly coders and their hippie attitude towards memory safety lol). The "religious zeal" was also an important reason why I switched back to C from C++ and why I don't have much interest in Rust. I can't quite stand the "holier than thou" attitude in.parts of those communities.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  > This was an important reason why I switched back to C from C++ and why I don't have much interest in Rust. I can't quite stand the the "holier than thou" attitude in.parts of those communities. This is 100% baffling to me. Let me explain. 1. Every single area has zealots. Yours included. And we're not talking only work. Every hobby area as well. 2. What the attitude of the most toxic 0.1% of the users of a thing is has exactly ZERO correlation with whether the thing is good and worth using. 3. By resisting only those 0.1% toxic zealots you are only demonstrating meaningless rebelliousness. As a supposed adult you should be immune to what are people hyping up and form your own opinion. INFORMED opinion. Not one based on the "many people praise it hence I, the intellectual, will stay far away from that obvious nonsense" stance. 4. Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, Rust is praised because it's actually good? Have you considered that the Rust community is not trying to cheat its way into your heart, and that the love Rust gets is justified by the people who need its features? Seems like you did not, and that's disappointing. In other words, I have zero clue of your thought process here, maybe you can help me understand? Back in my home town the VW Golf had an ardent fan base, yet one of my friends still bought one after he graduated. He didn't call the people who loved VW Golf zealots. He did his research and concluded that with his budget and mechanic skills the VW Golf is the ideal option. Food for thought?
  - nottorp 2y ago
    In Europe (esp Eastern), if you take resale price into account you have to get a german car because everything else loses value faster :) The VWs you can just dump on the fans. I know, I live in a similar country.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      The point is that the guy who was bombarded by feedback that VW Golf is good did not go out of his way to avoid buying it. He did his own research, formed his own informed opinion, and didn't go against the grain due to misguided notions. Wink wink.
      - jstimpfle 2y ago
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Are you sure? The C sphere overlaps with the UNIX one, for obvious reasons.
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    I can't remember Linux zealots raving irrationally about C though (although when googling I'm sure something will come up). Topics like Wayland or systemd on the other hand, oh my...
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      I said UNIX culture, not Linux. Diving into the ruins of Usenet, or UNIX/C literature, will provide enough examples.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      They are alive and well in this sub-thread of mine, quite a lot of them even. :) Down-voting and never engaging because who wants their bias challenged?
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> ... every community has zealots and it's mystifying to me why are people so annoyed by Rust's. Because they're the ones that we keep hearing from right now. When it was the Haskell zealots showing up every few days, they were annoying. When it was the Lisp zealots, they were annoying.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  Right now? Like where? Be specific and use arguments and not feelings.

CrimsonCape 2y ago

I saw your comment on an older C# thread in which you said (paraphrased) that C# is not bad, has nothing really stellar, and is just kind of bland. If you could theoretically swap out the entire back-end of a programming language, and hypothetically you did that to C# by allowing developers to write C# styling and syntax that could be compiled to Rust, it would probably not be a big loss. The type primitives would be an apples-apples comparison at best, or "Rust is just better" if you really scrutinized the types closely. Where does that leave the rest of the language? A better regex implementation? Rust would probably win. A better GUI experience? Rust is speedily approaching usable APIs there at the same time Microsoft is trying to sunset the best they had. I wonder if F# could be rebased on top of Rust...