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Comment by jakearmitage | Hacker News Reader

So... just use regular expressions when working with regular expressions?

No, that SIMD is good for string matching and Rust regex crate (written by burntsushi for 'ripgrep') makes very good use of it and is thus a nice library for implementing quick matchers.

Results from the benchmarks game suggests the performance of the Regex crate and calling PCRE2 from Python are about indistinguishable. The results also suggest CloudFlare could have achieved a 35% improvement using boring technology like the crusty old GCC.

PL evangelism and marketing are fine, but these blogs about Rust that come out 2-3 times a week and always make it to the HN or Lobsters front page seem a bit contrived.

You may feel this, but I find these articles to be a high-light of HN. Optimization adventures are stuff I learn from and actually use. That it's in Rust makes sense as it does offer new ways to do things (in this particular article, the Rust aspect wasn't particular important, but it's a follow up to one where it was).

C and C++ articles are ignored, though, which is where most high-performance work is done. This isn't an optimization article that incidentally mentions Rust. It's a Rust-evangelism article that incidentally mentions optimization. HN has been a dumping ground for Rust content marketers for almost a decade now.

HN articles that show up are the ones that got the most votes so it stands to reason it what people wants to read.

I'm sure that I'm not surprising you when I say that there are members of the Rust community, paid and otherwise, who brigade forums, like this one. You probably know a few by name.

I don't think "the people have spoken, and they want Rust!" I think you have a small number of very obsessive people who treat a programming language's popularity of all things as a crusade. JetBrains publishes the data from their developer surveys, and you can see the last one that very few people use Rust at all, and of those, very few, less than 1 in 8, have ever used it for actual work. If you look at surveys from previous years, you can see very little user retention. Why does nobody keep using the most-loved lang for more than a year?

Because it's just a sham, like how a decade ago everyone was 'learning' Haskell and writing blogs about Monads and how FP was the secret sauce for their next-big-thing. It's exhausting. We've had non-stop but-what-about-Rust since, what, 2011?

This horse is dead.

You've broken the site guidelines badly with this and other comments. That's a bannable offense on HN. I'm not going to ban you, because you've also posted quite good comments, but if you do this again, we will have to. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.

Rust is at the top of the hype cycle heap these days. The programming language in that position always gets undue attention on internet forums. HN has seen it happen more than once over the years, including with Go, Node, and so on. Forum readers like to read about shiny newness, and it's natural to they want to read about languages they don't use yet, especially when they find them exciting and want to believe the "this time is different" story.

That bias may be a problem in the software world (I personally think it is), but it's not evidence of brigading, and you can't make up stories about that here, and particularly not attack others personally about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596207). If you think you're seeing actual evidence of manipulation, please follow the guidelines and email hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.

> C and C++ articles are ignored

I don't see many such articles on HN, but is that because they are ignored, or because there aren't many submitted?

> This isn't an optimization article that incidentally mentions Rust. It's a Rust-evangelism article that incidentally mentions optimization

I'm not sure we read the same article - I don't use Rust, but I followed along with the article just fine. It seemed to me much more about SIMD and string matching algorithms

C and C++ articles are obviously not ignored. You might be running into the notice-dislike bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which leads people to overgeneralize about this kind of thing.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Please see my reply to you downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24601088. You've broken the site guidelines badly and normally we'd be banning an account for doing this.

You probably could get same optimization in FORTRAN, but so what?

Rust is just a more modern, better and more approachable programming language than C and C++, and people care about it more and prefer to get their little system programming lessons in it.

Using the benchmark game to judge the performance of regex engines for a specific task for anything other than what the benchmark game is doing is a serious mistake.

And I say this as the person who wrote the only non-PCRE regex engine that appears in the top 20 entries of the regex-redux benchmark.

Besides, if people want to use PCRE2 from Rust, then it's as simple as using a crate (which I also wrote): https://docs.rs/pcre2

This is the brigading I'm talking about. Every thread anywhere on HN or lobsters where anyone gives Rust anything but blind praise, you , Klabnik, Skade, Matklad or one of the entourage write walls of text like lunatics.

Let it go. Even by your own reasoning, reading anything into the Cloudfront article would be a mistake, right? Yet, here it is on the front page. Dutifully upvoted.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this, please, and please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24601088 also.

Thanks for the kind words, but note that it is actually the other way around! I wrote ripgrep for the regex engine. ;-) The initial version of ripgrep was just a kind of benchmarking tool that I used for the regex engine.

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