5 ms·

> I love and use rust, it is my favorite language and I use it in several of my OSS projects but I'm tired of this "rewrite it in rust" evangilism and the reput

> I love and use rust, it is my favorite language and I use it in several of my OSS projects but I'm tired of this "rewrite it in rust" evangilism and the reputational damage they do to the rust community. Thanks for this. I know intellectually, that there are sane/pragmatic people who appreciate Rust. But often the vibe I’ve gotten is the evangelism, the clear “I’ve found a tribe to be part of and it makes me feel special”. So it helps when the reasonable signal breaks through the noisy minority.

vablings 11mo ago
>I know intellectually, that there are sane/pragmatic people who appreciate Rust. For the most part that is almost everyone who works on rust and writes rust. The whole coreutils saga was pretty much entirely caused by Canonical, The coreutils rewrite project was originally a hobby project iirc and NOT ready for prod. for the most part the coreutils rewrite is going well all things considered, bugs are fixed quickly and performance will probably exceed the original implementation in some cases since concurrency is a cake-walk. The whole re-write it in rust largely stemmed from the idea that if you have a program in C and a program in Rust then the program in rust is "automatically" better which is often the case. The exception is very large battle tested projects with custom tooling in place to ensure the issues that make C/C++ a nightmare are somewhat reduced. Rust ships with the borrow checker by default meaning logically its like for like. In the real world it is not always the case there are still plenty of opportunity for straight up logic bugs and crashes (See cloudflare saga) that are completely just due to bad programming practices. Rust is the nail and the hammer, but you can still hit your finger if you don't know how to swing it properly FYI for the purpose of disclosing bias I am one of the few "rust first" developers. I learned the language in 2021, and it was the first "real" programming language I learned how to use effectively. Any attempts I have had to dive into other languages have been short lived and incredibly frustrating because rust is a first-class experience in how to make a systems programming language
- influx 11mo ago
  It really makes me upset that we are throwing away decades of battle tested code just because some people are excited about the language du jour. Between the systemd folks and the rust folks, it may be time for me to move to *BSD instead of Linux. Unfortunately, I'm very tied to Docker.
  - chillingeffect 11mo ago
    Even worse, the license requirements (gpl->mit) will be less beneficial to the community than the rust replacements.
    - steveklabnik 11mo ago
      Rust has no specific license requirements on code written in it. People choose whatever license they prefer.
      - chillingeffect 11mo ago
        True, but you might want to look into the licenses people are actually choosing for Rust versions of coreutils/uutils and who's promoting them.
        steveklabnik 11mo ago
        Sure, those authors chose that license because they did not really particularly care for the politics of licenses and chose the most common one in the Rust ecosystem, which is MIT/Apache 2. If folks want more Rust projects under licenses they prefer, they should start those projects.
        kstrauser 11mo ago
        I released my most recent Rust project under the GPLv3. The first issue was someone asking me to relicense it under MIT. I politely declined. I bring this up because no matter what you choose, someone will wish it was otherwise.
- kstrauser 11mo ago
  I agree with everything you've said here, except that the reality of speaking with a "rust first" developer is making me feel suddenly ancient. But that aside, the memory safety parts are a huge benefit, but far from the only one. Option and Result types are delightful. Exhaustive matching expressions that won't compile if you add a new variant that's not handled are huge. Types that make it impossible to accidentally pass a PngImage into a function expecting a str, even though they might both be defined as contiguous series of bytes down deep, makes lots of bugs impossible. A compiler that gives you freaking amazing error messages that tell you exactly what you did wrong and how you can fix it sets the standard, from my experience. And things like "cargo clippy" which tell you how you could improve your code, even if it's already working, to make it more efficient or more idiomatic, are icing on the cake. People so often get hung up on Rust's memory safety features, and dismiss is as through that's all it brings to the table. Far from it! Even if Rust were unsafe by default, I'd still rather use it that, say, C or C++ to develop large, robust apps because it has a long list of features that make it easy to write correct code, and really freaking challenging to write blatantly incorrect code. Frankly, I envy you, except that I don't envy what it's going to be like when you have to hack on a non-Rust code base that lacks a lot of these features. "What do you mean, int overflow. Those are both constants! How come it didn't let me know I couldn't add them together?"
antonvs 11mo ago
Much of the drive to rewrite software in Rust is a reaction to the decades-long dependence on C and C++. Many people out there sit in the burning room like the dog in that meme, saying "this is fine". Most of them don't have to deal at all directly with the consequences involved. Rust is the first language for a long time with a chance at improving this situation. A lot of the pushback against evangelism is from people who simply want to keep the status quo, because it's what they know. They have no concept of the systemic consequences. I'd rather see over-the-top evangelism than the lack of it, because the latter implies that things aren't going to change very fast.
- layer8 11mo ago
  You can’t change things faster than persuading the people that maintain the things. Over-the-top evangelism doesn’t work well for persuasion.
  - antonvs 11mo ago
    That was probably a mischaracterization on my part. I wouldn't consider rewriting almost everything useful that's currently in C or C++ to be over the top. That would be a net good. Posts that say "I rewrote X in Rust!" shouldn't actually be controversial. Every time you see one, you should think to yourself wow, the software world is moving towards being more stable and reliable, that's great!
    - uecker 11mo ago
      But it is nonsense. Every time some rewrote something (in Rust or anything else), I instead worry about what breaks again, what important feature is lost for the next decade, how much working knowledge is lost, what muscle memory is now useless, what documentation is outdated, etc. I also doubt Rust brings as many advantages in terms of stability that people claim. The C code I rely on in my daily work basically never fails (e.g. I can't remember "vim" ever crashing on me in the last 30 years I use it). That this is all rotten code C that needs to be written is just nonsense. IMHO it would far more useful to invest in proper maintenance and incremental improvements.
razighter777 11mo ago
Most of us sane people tend to be more quiet unfortunately. I enjoy rust, but I enjoy not breaking things for users and making lives harder for other devs even more.

vablings 11mo ago

>I know intellectually, that there are sane/pragmatic people who appreciate Rust. For the most part that is almost everyone who works on rust and writes rust. The whole coreutils saga was pretty much entirely caused by Canonical, The coreutils rewrite project was originally a hobby project iirc and NOT ready for prod. for the most part the coreutils rewrite is going well all things considered, bugs are fixed quickly and performance will probably exceed the original implementation in some cases since concurrency is a cake-walk. The whole re-write it in rust largely stemmed from the idea that if you have a program in C and a program in Rust then the program in rust is "automatically" better which is often the case. The exception is very large battle tested projects with custom tooling in place to ensure the issues that make C/C++ a nightmare are somewhat reduced. Rust ships with the borrow checker by default meaning logically its like for like. In the real world it is not always the case there are still plenty of opportunity for straight up logic bugs and crashes (See cloudflare saga) that are completely just due to bad programming practices. Rust is the nail and the hammer, but you can still hit your finger if you don't know how to swing it properly FYI for the purpose of disclosing bias I am one of the few "rust first" developers. I learned the language in 2021, and it was the first "real" programming language I learned how to use effectively. Any attempts I have had to dive into other languages have been short lived and incredibly frustrating because rust is a first-class experience in how to make a systems programming language

influx 11mo ago
It really makes me upset that we are throwing away decades of battle tested code just because some people are excited about the language du jour. Between the systemd folks and the rust folks, it may be time for me to move to *BSD instead of Linux. Unfortunately, I'm very tied to Docker.
- chillingeffect 11mo ago
  Even worse, the license requirements (gpl->mit) will be less beneficial to the community than the rust replacements.
  - steveklabnik 11mo ago
    Rust has no specific license requirements on code written in it. People choose whatever license they prefer.
    - chillingeffect 11mo ago
      True, but you might want to look into the licenses people are actually choosing for Rust versions of coreutils/uutils and who's promoting them.
      - steveklabnik 11mo ago
        Sure, those authors chose that license because they did not really particularly care for the politics of licenses and chose the most common one in the Rust ecosystem, which is MIT/Apache 2. If folks want more Rust projects under licenses they prefer, they should start those projects.
        kstrauser 11mo ago
        I released my most recent Rust project under the GPLv3. The first issue was someone asking me to relicense it under MIT. I politely declined. I bring this up because no matter what you choose, someone will wish it was otherwise.
kstrauser 11mo ago
I agree with everything you've said here, except that the reality of speaking with a "rust first" developer is making me feel suddenly ancient. But that aside, the memory safety parts are a huge benefit, but far from the only one. Option and Result types are delightful. Exhaustive matching expressions that won't compile if you add a new variant that's not handled are huge. Types that make it impossible to accidentally pass a PngImage into a function expecting a str, even though they might both be defined as contiguous series of bytes down deep, makes lots of bugs impossible. A compiler that gives you freaking amazing error messages that tell you exactly what you did wrong and how you can fix it sets the standard, from my experience. And things like "cargo clippy" which tell you how you could improve your code, even if it's already working, to make it more efficient or more idiomatic, are icing on the cake. People so often get hung up on Rust's memory safety features, and dismiss is as through that's all it brings to the table. Far from it! Even if Rust were unsafe by default, I'd still rather use it that, say, C or C++ to develop large, robust apps because it has a long list of features that make it easy to write correct code, and really freaking challenging to write blatantly incorrect code. Frankly, I envy you, except that I don't envy what it's going to be like when you have to hack on a non-Rust code base that lacks a lot of these features. "What do you mean, int overflow. Those are both constants! How come it didn't let me know I couldn't add them together?"

antonvs 11mo ago

Much of the drive to rewrite software in Rust is a reaction to the decades-long dependence on C and C++. Many people out there sit in the burning room like the dog in that meme, saying "this is fine". Most of them don't have to deal at all directly with the consequences involved. Rust is the first language for a long time with a chance at improving this situation. A lot of the pushback against evangelism is from people who simply want to keep the status quo, because it's what they know. They have no concept of the systemic consequences. I'd rather see over-the-top evangelism than the lack of it, because the latter implies that things aren't going to change very fast.

layer8 11mo ago
You can’t change things faster than persuading the people that maintain the things. Over-the-top evangelism doesn’t work well for persuasion.
- antonvs 11mo ago
  That was probably a mischaracterization on my part. I wouldn't consider rewriting almost everything useful that's currently in C or C++ to be over the top. That would be a net good. Posts that say "I rewrote X in Rust!" shouldn't actually be controversial. Every time you see one, you should think to yourself wow, the software world is moving towards being more stable and reliable, that's great!
  - uecker 11mo ago
    But it is nonsense. Every time some rewrote something (in Rust or anything else), I instead worry about what breaks again, what important feature is lost for the next decade, how much working knowledge is lost, what muscle memory is now useless, what documentation is outdated, etc. I also doubt Rust brings as many advantages in terms of stability that people claim. The C code I rely on in my daily work basically never fails (e.g. I can't remember "vim" ever crashing on me in the last 30 years I use it). That this is all rotten code C that needs to be written is just nonsense. IMHO it would far more useful to invest in proper maintenance and incremental improvements.

razighter777 11mo ago

Most of us sane people tend to be more quiet unfortunately. I enjoy rust, but I enjoy not breaking things for users and making lives harder for other devs even more.