I am very nervous about Rust. My team recently started on a Rust project because we had a need to build something that would compile to WebAssembly. Without getting into too much detail, the WebAssembly runtimes for memory managed languages wouldn't work for what we're doing. We are not a company that does a lot with C/C++ and those of us who have used C/C++ do not particularly enjoy it, so we decided to go with Rust.

I do like Rust and it has worked well for this particular project. The problem, though, is that now there's a Rust mania that has set in and a desire to write/rewrite lots of stuff with Rust. Based on what I've seen out there on the web, this seems like a common thing. While Rust offered a clear benefit to us for the WebAssembly work, for every other case the benefits of Rust are mostly absent or minimal but the drawbacks around losing a garbage collector, losing a large healthy package ecosystem, losing use of our existing internal libraries and tooling, etc. loom large.

So I am in an unhappy position where I keep telling enthusiastic Rust advocates no. Another interesting thing is that people tell their friends that we are using Rust and now they want to apply to work for us. We have a hard time recruiting and there's part of me that wonders if we'd just be flooded with applicants if we started advertising Rust jobs. This is somewhat tempting - we might be able to easily hire teams of enthusiasts to churn out Rust but for how long? How long will it have this magic aura and following? I certainly don't want to be left with tons of crappy Rust code in a few years that nobody wants to maintain.

I feel like HN has mostly been very enthusiastic about Rust. A thread critical of Rust is rare and I feel like it is refreshing.