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I think we’ve officially reached the inflection point where the Rust haters have become more annoying than the Rust evangelists. Maybe in a couple years we will

I think we’ve officially reached the inflection point where the Rust haters have become more annoying than the Rust evangelists. Maybe in a couple years we will finally be able to stop writing blog post about it.

edoceo 11mo ago
Not to worry, another tech thing will be along shortly to fill the hype/hate cycle with its own drivel.
- ozim 11mo ago
  Unfortunately there are topics that should stop long ago but people still rave about those: ORMs, OOP, Git, JavaScript bloat, Linux vs Windows. Somehow there are always fresh people who think someone cares or that somehow those are important discussions.
  - byko3y 11mo ago
    >ORMs, OOP, Git, JavaScript bloat, Linux vs Windows ORM and OOP whine is niche, agreed. Linux vs Windows is irrelevant because windows runs linux nowadays — I don't think I've read a single article about it. Git? Okay, mostly circumvented by solutions that don't carry any implementation from the original Git, but have "git" in the product name. Javascript bloat? I'm pretty sure that's still a hot topic. I don't remember it being solved, do you? Like if I open website and it greets me with a window suggesting to apply cookie policies for 300 (three hundred) trackers on the website — isn't it worth talking about?
    - ongy 11mo ago
      ok, I'll bite. What's the git product that only carries the name?
- Klonoar 11mo ago
  Zig currently sits in the hype cycle like Rust/Ruby/Lisp/etc once did here. Eventually something will come along and Zig will be in the hate cycle. In reality none of these things need the religious wars that seem to go back and forth. It's just an incredibly unfortunate and annoying aspect of how programmer-centric communities tend to go.
  - osigurdson 11mo ago
    The objective rate of improvement in programming languages has been slower than virtually every other field. Computers have gotten millions of times faster since the advent of C, but programming languages have arguably gotten maybe 10% better in that span.
lumost 11mo ago
We really just need official/honest guidance on Rust for what works and what doesn't. The classic example is the dodging around cyclic datastructures. Tl;DR Rust doesn't support any form of cyclic datastructure without indirection or unsafe. The indirection tooling is weak, and most real examples simply switch to unsafe rust. Unsafe rust is completely fine if you know what you are doing with memory, and is ok to use in these situations. There are a few other gotchas that we just need to be clear about, some of these gotchas are limiting for developing higher level software and some are not e.g. String handling. If you are comfortable with unsafe, the rust toolchain is vastly superior to C/C++ development making it as close to an ideal replacement as we are likely to get.
- josephg 11mo ago
  A couple years ago I implemented a btree (technically order statistic tree) in a couple thousand lines of unsafe rust for a project. I wrote it more or less how I'd do it in C. Each internal node and leaf node was a separate heap allocation and internal nodes had an array of child pointers. It was surprisingly hard to program up. And complicated! In my opinion, unsafe rust code is worse to use than C because rust is missing the arrow operator. And rust still requires strict aliasing to be followed even in unsafe code. This makes complex unsafe code very hard to implement correctly. Like, it’s easy for something to look right and work correctly but for MIR to still find subtle issues. Eventually I rewrote my btree on top of Vecs. My node & leaf pointers are now array indices. The result? There is no longer any unsafe code. The code has become significantly simpler and it now runs ~10% faster than it did before, which is shocking to me. I guess bounds checks are cheaper than memory fragmentation on modern computers. I have so many thoughts having done that. First, I think this is actually the right way to write rust. Yes, manually keeping track of which array slots are in use is inconvenient. But unsafe & pointers are also quite inconvenient in rust. Programming like this makes use after free bugs possible to write. But it’s still memory safe by rust’s definition. It’s impossible to get arbitrary heap corruption because there are no raw pointers. And the indexes are bounds checked. I also don’t think the resulting code is any worse than the equivalent C++. Everyone talks about memory safety but IMO rust’s best features are enums, traits, cargo, match expressions and so on. Even when you do a run around the borrow checker, it’s these features which make me keep coming back to rust. I agree better guidance would be nice, but so many words have been spilled on rust already. Would you find content talking about subtle stuff like this? Sometimes the only way to learn is by trying stuff out.
hu3 11mo ago
> Rust haters have become more annoying than the Rust evangelists I disagree. There's a long road till that inflection point for me.
- yoyohello13 11mo ago
  At least the Rust evangelist build shit.
  - hu3 11mo ago
    People who get shit done are too busy to evangelize.
cwillu 11mo ago
“Summary: So, is the Rust bad or good? It’s neither. It’s a mediocre programming language with thousands of man-month put into its development — this fact alone makes Rust a viable tool, just because you can pick it from the shelf and employ as-is. This blog was generated with Zola, written in Rust — I did not have to write a single line of Rust code to use it. And the Rust is a good fit for Zola SSG because of its non-interactive nature with one-way flow of immutable data. Just, please, don’t run around screaming “we should all switch our development to Rust because it’s the best programming language”.” Is this what makes someone a Rust hater?
- loeg 11mo ago
  It seems pretty clear from the article as a whole.
- yoyohello13 11mo ago
  Literally hates on Rust for the whole article except the final summary.
  - byko3y 11mo ago
    Man, I explained it in the first sentence of the article — it's not bad, it's much worse than it could have been. The main body of the article is not hate — it's plain facts. Everybody working on a significant Rust codebase agrees that Rust compilation takes eternity. Complexity? I know people that like complexity, they would say "that's a great language because of how hard it is to write a program in it!" — complexity would feel like a praise for them. Shared state? "Just don't use it, you are doing it wrong". That's is, where is the hatred?
    - HeavyStorm 11mo ago
      Subjectiviy (eternity, complex, etc) is never factual. Your post has facts, it does, but it still sounds a lot like hate.
    - josephg 11mo ago
      > The main body of the article is not hate — it's plain facts. Everybody working on a significant Rust codebase agrees ... Lol. Its not facts. Its a description of frustrating things you've experienced working with rust, dressed up as "deep truths about the language". You don't speak for the rust community. This article would be much more interesting if you just talked about your own experience without pretending your issues are universal. Re: compilation time, in the 2024 state of rust survey 25% of rust developers said slow builds was a big problem. And thats a lot of people! But 19% of people said its not a problem at all for them. Its certainly not "everyone". https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Survey-results/ https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Sur... I suspect if you keep using rust, the things that annoy you about the language will change a lot over time. Some things will stop bothering you, and some things will start bothering you a lot more! (Like IMO Rc/Box/etc isn't a big deal. Once you learn to structure your code in a rusty way, you almost never need that stuff.) I really like rust now. But I found learning rust to be incredibly painful. I get why you're struggling with it. But please don't confuse your struggle for universal truths about rust. You're only one person.
siliconsorcerer 11mo ago
Absolutely not. Rust lovers are still incessant as they’ve ever been. More Rust haters is a good thing.
- yoyohello13 11mo ago
  I haven’t seen a positive Rust article hit HN in over a year. Seems the zeitgeist has turned against it. All it took was the US government giving the thumbs up I guess.
  - byko3y 11mo ago
    On the other hand, lets face it: most of the time security in IT systems is the least priority. I mean after shipping fast, iterate fast, better performance, compatibility, architecture soundness (whatever it is), convenient tests, docs with UML diagram, well-designed interface — and somewhere in a distant drawer on the bottom you may find a note about security issues. It's often times people talk about importance of security after it destroyed the whole business. We need more of the security. We probably don't need the Rust though.
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
      security incident destroying a business is so rare and penalties for security breaches are non-existent and hence while everyone talks “security is important” it really isn’t all that important - in vast majority of the situations. I mean, fucking experian, the company whose sole purpose for existence is collecting and keeping data on everyone safe leaked everyone’s data and everyone was like “oh ok, thats cool, carry on…”
    - imtringued 11mo ago
      >We probably don't need the Rust though. Uhm, I would have picked Rust just for shipping fast, iterating fast, better performance and compatibility. The security is a bonus that comes along for the ride. You probably haven't had the displeasure to work with C++ in combination with ROS. That experience really soured me on C++.
- 11mo ago
Mauneam 11mo ago
We are nowhere near that inflection point!
ufmace 11mo ago
Speaking of, maybe I started paying attention at the wrong time, but I could swear I've seen like 10x more post/comment volume whining about how annoying the "Rust evangelism strike force" supposedly is than actual excessive Rust evangelism

edoceo 11mo ago

Not to worry, another tech thing will be along shortly to fill the hype/hate cycle with its own drivel.

ozim 11mo ago
Unfortunately there are topics that should stop long ago but people still rave about those: ORMs, OOP, Git, JavaScript bloat, Linux vs Windows. Somehow there are always fresh people who think someone cares or that somehow those are important discussions.
- byko3y 11mo ago
  >ORMs, OOP, Git, JavaScript bloat, Linux vs Windows ORM and OOP whine is niche, agreed. Linux vs Windows is irrelevant because windows runs linux nowadays — I don't think I've read a single article about it. Git? Okay, mostly circumvented by solutions that don't carry any implementation from the original Git, but have "git" in the product name. Javascript bloat? I'm pretty sure that's still a hot topic. I don't remember it being solved, do you? Like if I open website and it greets me with a window suggesting to apply cookie policies for 300 (three hundred) trackers on the website — isn't it worth talking about?
  - ongy 11mo ago
    ok, I'll bite. What's the git product that only carries the name?
Klonoar 11mo ago
Zig currently sits in the hype cycle like Rust/Ruby/Lisp/etc once did here. Eventually something will come along and Zig will be in the hate cycle. In reality none of these things need the religious wars that seem to go back and forth. It's just an incredibly unfortunate and annoying aspect of how programmer-centric communities tend to go.
- osigurdson 11mo ago
  The objective rate of improvement in programming languages has been slower than virtually every other field. Computers have gotten millions of times faster since the advent of C, but programming languages have arguably gotten maybe 10% better in that span.

lumost 11mo ago

We really just need official/honest guidance on Rust for what works and what doesn't. The classic example is the dodging around cyclic datastructures. Tl;DR Rust doesn't support any form of cyclic datastructure without indirection or unsafe. The indirection tooling is weak, and most real examples simply switch to unsafe rust. Unsafe rust is completely fine if you know what you are doing with memory, and is ok to use in these situations. There are a few other gotchas that we just need to be clear about, some of these gotchas are limiting for developing higher level software and some are not e.g. String handling. If you are comfortable with unsafe, the rust toolchain is vastly superior to C/C++ development making it as close to an ideal replacement as we are likely to get.

josephg 11mo ago
A couple years ago I implemented a btree (technically order statistic tree) in a couple thousand lines of unsafe rust for a project. I wrote it more or less how I'd do it in C. Each internal node and leaf node was a separate heap allocation and internal nodes had an array of child pointers. It was surprisingly hard to program up. And complicated! In my opinion, unsafe rust code is worse to use than C because rust is missing the arrow operator. And rust still requires strict aliasing to be followed even in unsafe code. This makes complex unsafe code very hard to implement correctly. Like, it’s easy for something to look right and work correctly but for MIR to still find subtle issues. Eventually I rewrote my btree on top of Vecs. My node & leaf pointers are now array indices. The result? There is no longer any unsafe code. The code has become significantly simpler and it now runs ~10% faster than it did before, which is shocking to me. I guess bounds checks are cheaper than memory fragmentation on modern computers. I have so many thoughts having done that. First, I think this is actually the right way to write rust. Yes, manually keeping track of which array slots are in use is inconvenient. But unsafe & pointers are also quite inconvenient in rust. Programming like this makes use after free bugs possible to write. But it’s still memory safe by rust’s definition. It’s impossible to get arbitrary heap corruption because there are no raw pointers. And the indexes are bounds checked. I also don’t think the resulting code is any worse than the equivalent C++. Everyone talks about memory safety but IMO rust’s best features are enums, traits, cargo, match expressions and so on. Even when you do a run around the borrow checker, it’s these features which make me keep coming back to rust. I agree better guidance would be nice, but so many words have been spilled on rust already. Would you find content talking about subtle stuff like this? Sometimes the only way to learn is by trying stuff out.

hu3 11mo ago

> Rust haters have become more annoying than the Rust evangelists I disagree. There's a long road till that inflection point for me.

yoyohello13 11mo ago
At least the Rust evangelist build shit.
- hu3 11mo ago
  People who get shit done are too busy to evangelize.

cwillu 11mo ago

“Summary: So, is the Rust bad or good? It’s neither. It’s a mediocre programming language with thousands of man-month put into its development — this fact alone makes Rust a viable tool, just because you can pick it from the shelf and employ as-is. This blog was generated with Zola, written in Rust — I did not have to write a single line of Rust code to use it. And the Rust is a good fit for Zola SSG because of its non-interactive nature with one-way flow of immutable data. Just, please, don’t run around screaming “we should all switch our development to Rust because it’s the best programming language”.” Is this what makes someone a Rust hater?

loeg 11mo ago
It seems pretty clear from the article as a whole.
yoyohello13 11mo ago
Literally hates on Rust for the whole article except the final summary.
- byko3y 11mo ago
  Man, I explained it in the first sentence of the article — it's not bad, it's much worse than it could have been. The main body of the article is not hate — it's plain facts. Everybody working on a significant Rust codebase agrees that Rust compilation takes eternity. Complexity? I know people that like complexity, they would say "that's a great language because of how hard it is to write a program in it!" — complexity would feel like a praise for them. Shared state? "Just don't use it, you are doing it wrong". That's is, where is the hatred?
  - HeavyStorm 11mo ago
    Subjectiviy (eternity, complex, etc) is never factual. Your post has facts, it does, but it still sounds a lot like hate.
  - josephg 11mo ago
    > The main body of the article is not hate — it's plain facts. Everybody working on a significant Rust codebase agrees ... Lol. Its not facts. Its a description of frustrating things you've experienced working with rust, dressed up as "deep truths about the language". You don't speak for the rust community. This article would be much more interesting if you just talked about your own experience without pretending your issues are universal. Re: compilation time, in the 2024 state of rust survey 25% of rust developers said slow builds was a big problem. And thats a lot of people! But 19% of people said its not a problem at all for them. Its certainly not "everyone". https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Survey-results/ https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Sur... I suspect if you keep using rust, the things that annoy you about the language will change a lot over time. Some things will stop bothering you, and some things will start bothering you a lot more! (Like IMO Rc/Box/etc isn't a big deal. Once you learn to structure your code in a rusty way, you almost never need that stuff.) I really like rust now. But I found learning rust to be incredibly painful. I get why you're struggling with it. But please don't confuse your struggle for universal truths about rust. You're only one person.

siliconsorcerer 11mo ago

Absolutely not. Rust lovers are still incessant as they’ve ever been. More Rust haters is a good thing.

yoyohello13 11mo ago
I haven’t seen a positive Rust article hit HN in over a year. Seems the zeitgeist has turned against it. All it took was the US government giving the thumbs up I guess.
- byko3y 11mo ago
  On the other hand, lets face it: most of the time security in IT systems is the least priority. I mean after shipping fast, iterate fast, better performance, compatibility, architecture soundness (whatever it is), convenient tests, docs with UML diagram, well-designed interface — and somewhere in a distant drawer on the bottom you may find a note about security issues. It's often times people talk about importance of security after it destroyed the whole business. We need more of the security. We probably don't need the Rust though.
  - bdangubic 11mo ago
    security incident destroying a business is so rare and penalties for security breaches are non-existent and hence while everyone talks “security is important” it really isn’t all that important - in vast majority of the situations. I mean, fucking experian, the company whose sole purpose for existence is collecting and keeping data on everyone safe leaked everyone’s data and everyone was like “oh ok, thats cool, carry on…”
  - imtringued 11mo ago
    >We probably don't need the Rust though. Uhm, I would have picked Rust just for shipping fast, iterating fast, better performance and compatibility. The security is a bonus that comes along for the ride. You probably haven't had the displeasure to work with C++ in combination with ROS. That experience really soured me on C++.
11mo ago

Mauneam 11mo ago

We are nowhere near that inflection point!

ufmace 11mo ago

Speaking of, maybe I started paying attention at the wrong time, but I could swear I've seen like 10x more post/comment volume whining about how annoying the "Rust evangelism strike force" supposedly is than actual excessive Rust evangelism