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> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. I tried to get into Zig
by skhameneh 3mo ago
> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it.
This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.
I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).
I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.
I'm not a Rust contributor and I don't care for some of the challenges that come with Rust, but I love what it accomplished and I find it does it very well.
Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.
- nixpulvis 3mo agoCulture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress throughout all of technology.
- ori_b 3mo agoWhy does liking something different from you imply there's a war?
- hoppp 3mo agoThere is often a neo-tribalistic mentality. "My tribe is better than your tribe" Some people thrive inside this mentality, whole others don't go near it. Not everyone is thinking like this but a lot of people do. So because of that it's a common heuristic to think of it as "war" because there are some people who do that gladly.
- flohofwoe 3mo agoIn computing this is almost a tradition (Commodore vs Atari vs PC, Windows vs UNIX vs MacOS). It hasn't exactly hindered progress, I'd rather call it healthy competition ;) Still though: Amiga 4 ever! :D
- nixpulvis 3mo agoIt doesn't and I never said anything about preferences directly. There are however culture wars, and they cause problems throughout the industry and discipline.
- juudjjsa 3mo ago[flagged]
- ks2048 3mo agoIt seems to hinge a lot on what is “culture”.
- pstuart 3mo ago"my tribe"
- dbetteridge 3mo agoYou could just have left off the last part of that :D > Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress
- pron 3mo ago> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. Then why is it weird if you're saying the same thing? Different programming languages appeal to programmers with different tastes, and so it makes sense that some programmers would be drawn to language X and dislike language Y, while others would be the opposite.
- nine_k 3mo agoMaybe it's even the other way around: different cultures and tastes give birth to different languages and community norms around them.
- skhameneh 3mo agoThis is a good take. I was interested in accomplishing my goals and had an interest in both Rust and Zig. Going in, Rust was already proven to meet my needs and I was exploring Zig. Everything being centered around anti-Rust and “better than Rust” without meeting my needs made it a non-starter, it got in the way of discussing the languages themselves.
- garbagepatch 3mo agoWhen was this? I've only seen this "anti-rust" vibe in the past few weeks, guess triggered by the Bun rewrite. Zig people usually will tell you to use the right tool for the job over shilling the language or that you don't need to use it yet (if you want a stable language/documentation) the language will be there if you want to check it in a few years.
- skhameneh 3mo agoApproximately 5 years ago
- rapind 3mo agoI have definitely witnessed very specific cultures around languages I really like that I generally just don't vibe with. The author creates something brilliant, but there's a cadre of early adopters that shape a political and somewhat egotistical community that rubs me wrong. Once I spot them, I don't engage with the community. And it's not even that I disagree with the politics they espouse... I'm usually on the same page, but it's just kind of exhausting and a little over the top. I'm old-ish though and grew up apolitical, so I'm sure it's just a me problem.
- Crisco 3mo agoI’ve worked with people who I appreciate for their unapologetic willingness to be who they are. I might not agree with their opinions and think they’re a little extreme, but I’m glad people like them exist and enjoy seeing what they devote their time to. Based on the rest of Mitchell’s response, I think something like that is what is appreciated about Zig. I don’t use Zig, and frequently use Rust, but I’ve never really interacted with the core development team for either. I don’t think it’s necessary to care about whatever culture is driving development once it has sufficient velocity. The Rust I use today is more than enough for my needs. Maybe if I were more involved in open source I would better understand why culture matters, but unfortunately I’m mostly a consumer of it, not a producer.
- bri3d 3mo agoThis is weird to me too, especially to say in the present tense in 2026. I think I get the point about "Rust culture" (although it's too vague to agree or disagree with, probably on purpose). But in 2026, Rust is fully a commodity language, and especially to compare it to Zig in this angle is bizarre. Even turning my stereotypes to 11 and thinking back to when I worked with a team developing Rust professionally in 2021, I'd say we got mostly ended up hiring "proglang enthusiasts" and not "Rust people." In terms of "cultural dilution" alone Zig is orders of magnitude more culty than Rust because that many fewer people use it.
- mountainriver 3mo agoI feel this way about most Hashi tools, they just seem massively overrated to me. Ghostty is fine I guess, I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features. Zig is fine, has some cool stuff, the community seems roughly the same as the rust, with again just way less features. The rest of the hashi tools are fine, I don’t really use any of them anymore. Vault was a big deal at some point I guess
- slekker 3mo agoThat's so dismissive, the HashiCorp products were a game changer in a world that had very little, Vault and Terraform are super widely used
- LtWorf 3mo agoAh yeah… it was so fun when vault wouldn't let me store a 4096bit private key because it was too long, so I had to use 2048bit one instead. Peak software engineering right there.
- mountainriver 2mo agodid you look cool using it though?
- jeffyaw 3mo agoi was an early vagrant user, a long time tf user, and 3 year nomad/consul user. but have moved on. cf now for aws & gcloud cli in scripts for gcp. and eks/gke instead of nomad.
- firesteelrain 3mo agoVault can seem niche however it’s used a lot in high assurance environments given it is easily integrated with Thales HSMs and has FIPS compliance
- konart 3mo ago>niche Literally all companies I've worked for a know about use Vault for storing secrets to be used during deployment. It would be interesting to learn that this is different elsewhere.
- fukaiall 3mo agoWell you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? I’ve seen so many dogmatic views of those Rust apostles here on HN and Linked who think Rust is the only valuable language and all the others - Python, Go, C++ (of course) - are rubbish. I am so fed up with those snobbish views of a few Rust lovers and as much as I love the language I want to avoid those ignorant fucks.
- latexr 3mo ago> Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? In fairness, Loris Cro is “VP of Community at Zig Software Foundation” so if there’s someone to judge the community by, Loris has more weight than just about anyone (perhaps excluding Andrew Kelly). Note I am not agreeing with your parent post, what I have seen from Loris and Andrew makes me interested in trying Zig.
- Ygg2 3mo ago> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig The Zig Evangelism Task Force has supplanted Rust as the premier hypebeast. And they'll be supplanted by the NEXT BIG THING.
- khuey 3mo ago> Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided. In hindsight (and at risk of starting a flame war), it's easier to be magnanimous when you are winning/have won.
- danudey 3mo agoIs it a competition? I wonder if the Zig people feel as though it is, because I doubt the Rust people do. Rust's big tentpole is "no memory management bugs, everything must be provably safe", whereas Zig is very proud of "no memory management, you have full control but you have to exercise it". I don't feel as though these are competing for the same audience or mindshare. I've used Zig a big (while trying to contribute to ghostty, at least), and it's an interesting language that I like the aesthetics of but I don't want to use. I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).
- busterarm 3mo ago> I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually). I share your complaints about the tools you came to Rust from, but the philosophy of not letting you go off script is great until it doesn't work for you. A lot of the reason some of us use the more flexible languages is because we've been in situations where a language and its ecosystem either won't let you do something outright or not without significant pain. Often when everything is on fire and your customers are cancelling contracts. You can't afford to wait for the core team or community to come in and save you in these situations. Having access to work around your problems is also the source of a lot of the pain you're talking about, but at least you get to stay in business to solve that problem tomorrow. To a very large degree, a lot of the Rust evangelists that I encounter in the wild are either hobbyists, academics or paid open source contributors at large companies. Most of the discussions I've seen wrt Rust at companies with actual deliverables stop at "Rust? Absolutely not.". Except for a very narrow set of systems where you want the kind of guarantees that Rust provides as a primary feature. For more general situations, the tradeoffs often aren't worth it.
- insanitybit 3mo agoI write rust and barely interact with the community. I used to. I spoke at the first rustconf, even. I don't really care to engage with the rust community anymore (I cut myself off entirely from most online communities tbh). I might stay away from a particularly toxic community or one with wildly different values, but I don't really get why you wouldn't write Rust just because of how some people post about it. Odd tbh. I find the whole thing about "oh the rust zealots" hand wringing stuff so silly, really.
- juudjjsa 3mo ago[flagged]
- seanhunter 3mo agoPlease stop spamming the same comment in multiple subthreads. Also it’s pretty clear you are applfanboysbgone and have created an alt account for this knowing what you are doing is against guidelines and are doing it anyway.
- bagxrvxpepzn 3mo ago[dead]
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agoI think you'll find that out of all the pairwise combinations of language communities, there's one that stands out as having beef with a bunch of other ones. And that's not true of e.g. Haskell and OCaml (or to nothing like the same degree), so it's not just about competition for mindshare, it's about an approach to competition for mindshare. The C++ community and the Zig community seem to get along fine, so it not about looking up at the entrenched thing or down at the new thing, many orders of magnitude there and no drama. Python, R, and Julia folks all seem to get along. On the frontend there are a zillion things that compile to JS and even in the big camp the frameworks are split 9 ways, you get a little heat here and there over Vercel throwing big bucks or something but it's rare, generally the Svelte people and the Astro people seem to not mind when the other one front pages or whatever. Rust is at war with the world. Maybe it can even win but it's a weird road to walk by choice.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago[dead]
- spacechild1 3mo ago> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission here on HN for years.
- applfanboysbgon 3mo agoSeriously. Yesterday there was a thread about a use-after-free bug in OpenBSD and despite BSD predating Rust by decades there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust (as though Rust would even protect you from all memory errors in a kernel project where you'd inevitably need to write unsafe Rust anyways!). Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.
- tstack 3mo ago> there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust Please provide a link to this comment. Someone asked an honest question and got reasonable responses that were informative. At no point did anyone chide the project for not using Rust. > Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none. Nah, people complaining about the supposed toxic community are noisier than the supposed toxic community.
- juudjjsa 3mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway27448 3mo agoYou have an awful low bar for what is considered chiding, damn Then again, your very username implies an indulgence in viewing technology through the lens of fandoms which is... weird
- busterarm 3mo ago
- kjs3 3mo agoI remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. Oh, please...if you haven't noticed the carpet bombing of rust advocacy on HN for more than 4 years and still in progress, you're deliberately not paying attention.
- voidhorse 3mo agoKind of tangential to the man Rust v. Zig culture debate but: > I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements). Kind of reeks of unreasonable expectations to me. I don't think one should expect language designers to redesign a language or introduce new features that would likely be poor fits with the overall existing language philosophy (the design and usage philosophies behind Rust and Zig are practically opposite poles). Language stewards have a responsibility to everyone in their existing user base and they have a responsibility to evolve the language in a ways that's consistent with the expectations they already established (if they want to keep their users that is). Expecting the designers to rework the language to bolt on features from some other language just for your project is kind of absurd. I think Loris's supposed response is actually correct here and probably the best response he could give, without knowing more about precisely what the requests were, how willing you were to contribute work yourself, etc.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoIt feels like Zig is trying to be more like C, and Rust is trying to fill a C++ slot. I wish someone would have made something in between, or that the industry would have adopted D more, it certainly didn't help that their compiler was proprietary for so long, and then they rewrote their STD lib. D to me is one language I love fundamentally, but the ecosystem is nowhere near where it could be.
- flohofwoe 3mo agoMeh... I dabbled a bit with D in context of the sokol-d language bindings, and IMHO it's an even bigger kitchen sink than C++.
- portly 3mo ago> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. I think you missed his point. He's arguing against homogeneity of (cyber) culture. For example, programming languages that promise to do everything. Rust fanatics indeed can be a bit like that. Every time I see a thread here about someone building something in Zig, they storm in and start arguing 'why not rust!?'. The fact that you don't like the zig community is healthy and not weird. Don't worry about it. You don't have to like everything and you can disagree on taste.
- Anonyneko 3mo ago>about how bad X is and how I could just do something different in Y That's just engineering communities in a nutshell...
- wmedrano 3mo agoThis is not surprising and perhaps one of the things I respect about it. Zig is pretty minimalist and I would prefer denying my pet features over becoming design by committee. I'm a bit curious, what features could you not do without?