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Comment by jonpalmisc | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic: So many projects and posts boast “written in Rust”. I haven’t been on HN that long—was there a point in time where “written in C++” was a similar “selling point”?

From a quick glance, it looks like this could have been implemented in any native language. I like Rust as much as the next guy, but using it to get clicks when Rust specifically over another native language doesn’t make a difference feels a bit clickbaity.

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I've seen myriad "written in C/Python/Java/JavaScript/TypeScript/Lua" posts over the years. You're not imagining things, though. The world waited 30 years (from the 1985 when C++ appeared to 2015 when Rust 1.0 was released) for a new, viable language in the systems space (read: without garbage collection). That's a really long time, and the excitement around the language is well deserved.

> for a new, viable language in the systems space (read: without garbage collection).

*Angry Oberon noises*

Stuart Smalley, as Oberon, looking into the mirror giving his daily affirmation: "I'm viable enough and, doggone it, people like me."

>I haven’t been on HN that long—was there a point in time where “written in C++” was a similar “selling point”?

There are a few projects that tout being written in C++, but it has never been a regular "selling point" in HN, because HN was a thing almost 2 decades after C++ was the "new hotness".

So, we've seen it for Node, Rust, and Go more.

>I like Rust as much as the next guy, but using it to get clicks when Rust specifically over another native language doesn’t make a difference feels a bit clickbaity.

You think this person spend weeks writing this for "clicks"? Unless the author posted it, they might not even know it was posted on HN (it's often the case with posted projects: someone else finds them and posts them).

They had a pet project in mind, they liked Rust and wanted to use it, they did.

> was there a point in time where “written in C++” was a similar “selling point”?

> using it to get clicks when Rust specifically over another native language doesn’t make a difference feels a bit clickbaity.

- every single article mentioning rust in any way has this complaint in the comments

- I think that much of the reason people mention it is not a cynical ploy for clicks (though that exists for sure), but denotes that the program is a modern program that is likely to work in a certain way? It's hard to specify what that way is, I should try and write something about it, but I think people who complain about this are missing that it's kind of a cultural signifier more than a literal statement about the language it's written in.

For me "written in Rust" signals three things:

* It is probably fast.

* It is almost certainly very easy to install.

* If anything is missing or broken I can probably fix it myself.

It's not a ploy for clicks. Programmers spend a lot of time working with programming languages and so the choice of language is an interesting thing to mention, no matter what it might be.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=written+in+c%2B%2B

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=written+in+python

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=written+in+go

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=written+in+rust

EDIT: There's one exception. "Written in bash" is and will always be clickbait, fight me

Wrong! "Written in COBOL" is the true clickbait.

"Written is bash" always means it's either unimpressive or absolutely horrifying.

Personally I rather like that convention (and similarly for Go). Often I will follow links that specify one of these two languages since I primarily work in Go and Rust, and it's useful to add them to my mental map (or favourites folder) of what is available such that if I need something similar I can find it again.

Libraries or tools written in C++ interest me less personally, because they're more work for me to integrate into whatever I'm typically doing, but I can see that someone working in C++ might like such things to be labelled the same way for the same end.

    it looks like this could have been implemented in any native language

I use this 30 line bash script, with a dependency on jq. It works for me, and is pretty much instant.

https://pastebin.com/raw/cnDk9zs4

Hey I like this. Can you make a powershell one?!

It's done for other languages, as others here have mentioned, but it happens more for Rust lately. A project being advertised as being written in JS or Java or C# does have a signal about how easy it is for the reader to contribute (if they know the language), to integrate it with other projects they use (network effects) or what their operation might be (can I build a single binary and deploy everywhere? what is the observability and debugging tooling like?).

Rust answers some of those implicit questions in a way that is acceptable to a lot of us.

Last I heard was from https://www.scylladb.com/ Selling point being C++ version of cassandra

There was probably a time when C++ had the kind of enthusiasm that Rust does now, but as C++ was released in ~1984, I don't know that you can quite compare the two.

Written In Rust is great because Rust is one of those Fun And Shiny languages that people want to write in just to write in it, like Elixir or Node (topical!), except it's not going to pull an Electron and involve a giant VM and a bundle system that includes a user-mode Xbox controller driver by default, but rather is faster in its first draft than you could possibly squeeze out of one of those other languages. Rust captures the 'systems they don't teach you about in college' vibe without products written in it slightly decreasing the usability of the developer ecosystem.

> it looks like this could have been implemented in any native language.

from the readme: "How: This is written in Rust! (Or any compile-to-native language)."

There was a time where anything with JavaScript in the title automatically got into the front page. And now it's Rust. Rust is now in it's golden age. The question is if all the enterprise "Java" will switch over from JS to Rust, and demand that Rust change it's syntax and methodologies so that the "JS" developers can understand it.

> was there a point in time where “written in C++” was a similar “selling point”?

Notepad++ maybe?

> Slightly off topic: So many projects and posts boast “written in Rust”. I haven’t been on HN that long—was there a point in time where “written in C++” was a similar “selling point”?

"Written in Rust" is the new "Sent from my iPhone".

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