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Comment by ssokolow | Hacker News Reader

> I really don't get the whole "rewrite it in Rust" thing at all, especially when 95% of those applications would be perfectly performant in a language that lets you focus on your domain, not on making the borrow-checker happy.

Generally, people who actually know what they're talking about see RIIR as being less about performance and more about getting stronger compile-time correctness guarantees than are available from languages with nullable types (holes in the type system), exceptions (hidden control flow paths), no sum types (limited ability to "make invalid states unrepresentable"), etc.

In that respect, Rust serves more as something to get the benefit of academic-originated functional languages with the FFI integratability and large community and ecosystem of more mainstream languages.

(I use it for command-line utilities and for writing compiled Python extensions. I'm still on Python for Django and PyQt.)

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This attitude is why I avoid Rust

What attitude?

The "Generally, people who actually know what they're talking about"? I could have phrased it better, but "Rewrite it in Rust" IS a bit of a groaner in the Rust community because of the history of having to do damage control for counter-productively rabid fans who have no idea that Rust isn't magic pixie dust and that rewrites actually take effort.

(I've been lurking in /r/rust/ since before Rust 1.0 came out in 2015, so I've seen a lot of that.)

The "In that respect, Rust serves"? I'm not the only one who sees Rust as taking the best stuff from functional programming and stopping before the return on investment starts to tank. For example:

https://dev.to/yujiri8/why-i-don-t-believe-in-pure-functiona...

Rewrite it in rust is not mature reaction from rust community. It is similar to arch linux btw boys you see in Linux communities.

And GP is right, you rust folk talk as if sum types are silver bullet. And you people also talk as if rust invented sum types (though you people don't imply it).

You folks talk as if cargo is the best package management solution that exist.

You folks talk as if web of hundreds of dependencies written by enthusiastic youngsters is not a problem for a language priding itself on safety properties (the attempts like crev don't get the attention they deserve).

You folks talk like the memory management overhead of rust is not a problem for creating average CRUD webshit.

You folks talk as if rust automatically guides you towards correct programming patterns, when that is out of necessity to facilitate static memory management. The business logic is not at fault here, neither is rust.

Some folks in the rust community frequently bring virtue signalling politics into programming language related medium.

Rust is a well designed systems language and deserves appreciation for bringing Ada / Cyclone / ATS' good parts as a usable language. But the community is ruining its image.

Plaudits to all involved.

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