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> I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype Yeah that is the thing I struggle with. I am really happy for people falling in love with Rust. It is a amazi

> I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype Yeah that is the thing I struggle with. I am really happy for people falling in love with Rust. It is a amazing language when used for the right use case. The problem is that had my Rust adventures a few years ago and I am over the hype cycle and able to see both the advantages and disadvantages. Plus being generally older and hopefully wiser I don't tie my identity towards any specific programming language that much. So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes.

Onavo 8mo ago
> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. And experience doesn't equal correct decision making. People just get traumatized in different ways.
geertj 8mo ago
> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes. This rings very true, and I've actually disadvantaged myself somewhat here. I was involved in projects that made very dubious decisions to rewrite large systems in Rust. This caused me to actively stay away from the language, and stick to C++, investing lots of time in overcoming its shortcomings. Now years later, I started with Rust in a new project. And I must say, I like the language, I really like the tools, and I like the ecosystem. On some dimension I wish I would have done this sooner (but on the other hand, I think I have a better justification of "why Rust" now).
virgil_disgr4ce 8mo ago
I'm contemplating diving into Rust for a smallish project, a daemon with super-basic UI intended for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Do you mind expanding on what disadvantages you encountered? Or use-cases that aren't appropriate for Rust?
- cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
  I'm not OP but here's my disadvantages. Rust is the way I earn my living, and also my open source tool of choice. And my background is 25 years of SWE career: 1. build / compile times can be atrocious 2. crates.io inherits the npm philosophy, which means fairly unmoderated space of third party deps and because the Rust stdlib doesn't have a lot in it, extensive third party crate (lib) usage is strong in Rust. As a result most Rust projects have rather sprawling dependency trees, often with duplicated functionality (multiple Base64, rand, sha256, etc crates). I personally have a problem with this (auditability, accountability, security, complexity etc). Others don't. 3. Despite being nominally runtime agnostic, Rust async basically is tokio and it's almost impossible to use another runtime once you factor in third party deps. In many ways Rust is the language that tokio ate. In fact even if you opt out of async entirely, you often end up with tokio as a dependency simply because the community just seems to expect it. 4. Despite advertising itself as a "systems" language, some basic systems programming facilities I expect from my C++ background are still fundamentally not there. In particular, per-container/struct pluggable allocators still isn't a thing and the feature to add it (allocator-api) has sat unmerged in nightly for almost ten years at this point and it doesn't look good for it landing any time soon. 5. If you're working in the embedded space, there's still plenty of devices that will not have a workable Rust toolchain option yet. I still choose it for new projects instead of its competitors C++ or Zig. But I think it's important to recognize there are compromises like any other tool. As much as people might insist otherwise, there will in fact come a day when there are "multiple Rusts" by which I mean multiple styles and ways of doing things -- just like C++. For myself, for example... if it were my repository and my team and my hiring, and I was starting from scratch... I'd be extremely careful about third party crate adoption and have an extremely minimalistic approach there. And I don't use tokio. Though my paying jobs do.
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    So many great and balanced comments in this thread.
    - cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
renewiltord 8mo ago
[flagged]
- staticassertion 8mo ago
  I've been writing rust for over a decade and I've been quite active in the community at times. I've barely even heard of the rust foundation, let alone seen suggestions to donate.
- swiftcoder 8mo ago
  > every ten seconds someone will start asking to tax everyone to fund Rust Software Foundation or constantly argue that you have to donate a percentage of income to it I have literally never heard this, in ~decade of working with Rust. I think you may be taking some random mailing list discussions a little too seriously
bjackman 8mo ago
I find the attitude of the Ladybird devs refreshing though, and it kinda aligns with my opinions about Rust. I never fell in love with Rust or got particularly excited about adopting it. But, I just don't see a serious alternative (maybe Swift is fine for some cases but not in my field). I believe Google's Rust journey was even more closely aligned with Ladybird: "we want memory safety, but with low impedance mismatch from C++". After like 5 years of trying to figure something like that out they seemed to go "OK actually fuck that we just have to use Rust and deal with the challenges it brings for a C++ shop".
akst 8mo ago
The whole obnoxious dogmatic evangelicalism thing is definitely a wider human phenomenon outside software and junior devs picking up new languages. Definitely isn’t one of those things that can be solved, but it’s helpful to be aware of and process on that basis. I think some personalities are likely disproportionately vulnerable to this behaviour, but I think it largely has a positive core of enthusiasm. It’s probably more a matter of those individuals growing in self awareness. Perhaps we saw a big wave of that with rust because it meant a lot of things to a lot of different people, some more equip to express their enthusiasm with some self control than others.

Onavo 8mo ago

> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. And experience doesn't equal correct decision making. People just get traumatized in different ways.

geertj 8mo ago

> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes. This rings very true, and I've actually disadvantaged myself somewhat here. I was involved in projects that made very dubious decisions to rewrite large systems in Rust. This caused me to actively stay away from the language, and stick to C++, investing lots of time in overcoming its shortcomings. Now years later, I started with Rust in a new project. And I must say, I like the language, I really like the tools, and I like the ecosystem. On some dimension I wish I would have done this sooner (but on the other hand, I think I have a better justification of "why Rust" now).

virgil_disgr4ce 8mo ago

I'm contemplating diving into Rust for a smallish project, a daemon with super-basic UI intended for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Do you mind expanding on what disadvantages you encountered? Or use-cases that aren't appropriate for Rust?

cmrdporcupine 8mo ago
I'm not OP but here's my disadvantages. Rust is the way I earn my living, and also my open source tool of choice. And my background is 25 years of SWE career: 1. build / compile times can be atrocious 2. crates.io inherits the npm philosophy, which means fairly unmoderated space of third party deps and because the Rust stdlib doesn't have a lot in it, extensive third party crate (lib) usage is strong in Rust. As a result most Rust projects have rather sprawling dependency trees, often with duplicated functionality (multiple Base64, rand, sha256, etc crates). I personally have a problem with this (auditability, accountability, security, complexity etc). Others don't. 3. Despite being nominally runtime agnostic, Rust async basically is tokio and it's almost impossible to use another runtime once you factor in third party deps. In many ways Rust is the language that tokio ate. In fact even if you opt out of async entirely, you often end up with tokio as a dependency simply because the community just seems to expect it. 4. Despite advertising itself as a "systems" language, some basic systems programming facilities I expect from my C++ background are still fundamentally not there. In particular, per-container/struct pluggable allocators still isn't a thing and the feature to add it (allocator-api) has sat unmerged in nightly for almost ten years at this point and it doesn't look good for it landing any time soon. 5. If you're working in the embedded space, there's still plenty of devices that will not have a workable Rust toolchain option yet. I still choose it for new projects instead of its competitors C++ or Zig. But I think it's important to recognize there are compromises like any other tool. As much as people might insist otherwise, there will in fact come a day when there are "multiple Rusts" by which I mean multiple styles and ways of doing things -- just like C++. For myself, for example... if it were my repository and my team and my hiring, and I was starting from scratch... I'd be extremely careful about third party crate adoption and have an extremely minimalistic approach there. And I don't use tokio. Though my paying jobs do.
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  So many great and balanced comments in this thread.
  - cmrdporcupine 8mo ago

renewiltord 8mo ago

[flagged]

staticassertion 8mo ago
I've been writing rust for over a decade and I've been quite active in the community at times. I've barely even heard of the rust foundation, let alone seen suggestions to donate.
swiftcoder 8mo ago
> every ten seconds someone will start asking to tax everyone to fund Rust Software Foundation or constantly argue that you have to donate a percentage of income to it I have literally never heard this, in ~decade of working with Rust. I think you may be taking some random mailing list discussions a little too seriously

bjackman 8mo ago

I find the attitude of the Ladybird devs refreshing though, and it kinda aligns with my opinions about Rust. I never fell in love with Rust or got particularly excited about adopting it. But, I just don't see a serious alternative (maybe Swift is fine for some cases but not in my field). I believe Google's Rust journey was even more closely aligned with Ladybird: "we want memory safety, but with low impedance mismatch from C++". After like 5 years of trying to figure something like that out they seemed to go "OK actually fuck that we just have to use Rust and deal with the challenges it brings for a C++ shop".

akst 8mo ago

The whole obnoxious dogmatic evangelicalism thing is definitely a wider human phenomenon outside software and junior devs picking up new languages. Definitely isn’t one of those things that can be solved, but it’s helpful to be aware of and process on that basis. I think some personalities are likely disproportionately vulnerable to this behaviour, but I think it largely has a positive core of enthusiasm. It’s probably more a matter of those individuals growing in self awareness. Perhaps we saw a big wave of that with rust because it meant a lot of things to a lot of different people, some more equip to express their enthusiasm with some self control than others.