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Comment by nbittich | Hacker News Reader

I think rust is the new haskell. After spending 7 months learning it, I can say I really enjoy the language, but there's no job in it and in my opinion, they take academic decisions that make the language way more complex than it should. Also, the community is toxic.

For example, generics in Go were criticized by some, praised by others.

You have the feeling that you can freely share your opinion in the go community without the risk of being harassed by the rest of the community.

In the rust community, just like a sect, everybody must say that everything is just perfect.

Passive / aggressive attitude is something I've seen a lot in the rust community.

I would suggest that if your plan is to learn C/C++ next, and you never really understood memory issues && pointers, then rust is a perfect choice at first.

I'm planning to learn Go next, I don't regret learning rust, I learned lots of things with it.

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> but there's no job in

That's just not true.

Rust got already adopted by lot of either big or interesting to work at players (Amazon, Microsoft, DropBox, ...?) and, while anecdotal, I myself get also paid to program rust.

> the community is toxic. > In the rust community, just like a sect, everybody must say that everything is just perfect.

I often get the opposite feeling with all the diverse and lengthy discussions about how to do things, e.g., like getting async stable a few years ago or long blog articles of core contributors that state "we can do a lot better here and there" in public blog posts that get shared on /r/rust and don't get shunned.

> Rust got already adopted by lot of either big or interesting to work at players (Amazon, Microsoft, DropBox, ...?) and, while anecdotal, I myself get also paid to program rust.

There are very few open positions, though. Just check out the Rust newsletter - the open positions for each release can be counted on one hand.

I have the suspicions that Rust positions are typically filled in-house. Shopify, for example, adopted Rust, but AFAIK they did not hire anybody external to do so (nothing wrong with this, of course).

> Just check out the Rust newsletter - the open positions for each release can be counted on one hand.

IMO there's only a tiny selection on that newsletter, it's just not a canonical source for rust jobs. E.g. and again anecdotal, we don't post our rust job openings there either as such more widely read publications are seldom a good fit, just like the monthly HN "who's hiring" thread - we don't want a flood of applications whom a good percentage of cannot even bother to read the few basic "must haves" for the job.

Also, in house fillings need employees that can program in rust too.

Our company (Prisma) is currently hiring Rust engineers. Remote jobs, office in Berlin for those who need it and interesting problems to solve.

> Also, the community is toxic.

How so? I've seen the random drama crop up here and there, but it always seemed to mostly be about the "political" side of things, as opposed to the technical development.

What few interactions I've had with library maintainers and the tokio project have always been positive, and the people always seemed helpful.

Comments like this one below are often downvoted without reply just because they criticise rust:

> I founf myself in your same situation a few months ago. I chose Rust and regret it...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32105336

GP puts it well:

> Just like in any sect. As long as you agree everything is perfect, the community is the friendliest indeed.

The community isn't toxic as long as you happen to agree with it and praise Rust... Go figure.

GP is also wrong.

At this point it's mostly a meme. Rust is slow to compile. I mean, yeah if you abuse meta programming or monomorphisation.

I've been programming in it, and while I like the language, I'm not on the language community bandwagon. E.g. CoC and it's enforcement (I think it's just pointless grandstanding).

I've seen pretty much zero grandstanding in the Rust community about the CoC. They seem to treat it as any CoC should be treated in practice; a failsafe measure which is most critical for in-person events, and to protect people who make their real-world identity public from aggressive trolling and malicious behavior.

First. You are arguing against my sidenote, on why I don't consider myself Rust coolaid member. Second: it's just my opinion.

Third: I said CoC is grandstanding. It's just a toothless document, that pretends to solve issues much like renaming Git default branch master->main.

We saw it wasn't enforceable last year when Rust moderators quit over being unable to enforce it.

> Also, the community is toxic.

The Rust community has been the friendliest PL community I've seen so far.

Just like in any sect. As long as you agree everything is perfect, the community is the friendliest indeed.

Nope, many times I submitted a question, got help instantly with a very long explanation telling why the thing I try to do makes sense and should work, but some things in the compiler or libraries haven't been stabilized or finished yet, and they were working on that. And then giving me some temporary workarounds.

The community definitely acknowledges the limitations and sharp edges and listens to the users. Thanks to that attitude, Rust is way more friendly and easier to use than it was 5 years ago.

That's not fair to Rust. I think it's feature of community size and genuine interest/innovation in Rust.

There's similar thing about Haskell. I often hear stories like "wow, I'm so glad I found Haskell, the community has been so friendly and helpful" and then other stories like "I tried Haskell and I liked the language but it was just such a toxic community". I don't really know what to make of this, and at this point I just put it down to the infinite variety in human experiences and preferences.

> there's no job in [Rust]

As of today, indeed.com lists 1,500 remote jobs mentioning Rust vs. 4,018 jobs mentioning Golang. That's not so bad. (However, there's no way to tell how many of those listings are Rust-specific as opposed to polyglot job descriptions.)

> Also, the [Rust] community is toxic.

Speaking slightly humorously, if you think Rust community is toxic, try expressing your dissatisfaction with Swift or Apple in the fanboi Swift community (controlled by Apple employees) and see what happens to you :).

Most "jobs mentioning Rust" are in the crypto space for some reason. I can't fault devs for thinking that such "opportunities" are just not very serious compared to the alternatives.

Every one of the big tech companies have large Rust projects. Even Apple has open job listings for Rust devs.

I agree that crypto indeed started out as a dumb, speculative, monetary technology, but it is currently moving toward smart-contract, non-speculative applications, such as guaranteed voting or transfer-of-ownership systems. Crypto indeed started out as a nonsensically power-hungry technology (via Proof-of-Work), but it is currently moving toward power-friendly infrastructure (via Proof-of-Stake). I think the crypto sector will slowly become more and more interesting, employment-wise. For example, how about writing a single contract that is understandable not only by a machine, but also, at the same time, by a judge in a court of law?

Development is development.

Video games are not "serious", yet any C++ developer getting their chops in video game programming is not shunned for it.

> Also, the community is toxic.

I think "somewhat dogmatic" would be a more accurate description of the Rust community, IMO.

For example, I recently had a discussion about `enum` being a poor choice for what Rust makes it to mean from a C/C++ developer's point of view (which are Rust's main "replacement target" languages). The closest I got someone to agreeing with me is a sentiment along these lines "well, `variant` would may have been a better choice but it's not very familiar to C/C++ developers and, besides, when this decision was made, Rust had a hard limit of 5 characters on keyword length".

FWIW, changing the keyword and nomenclature for such a fundamental part of the language after so much time has passed is... not realistic. Any conversation around it is bound to be somewhat fraught, and happens often enough that people have gone over it and aren't particularly keen to retread it. To the person starting the conversation it might seem like people are handwaving away arguments or being dismissive.

> Also, the community is toxic.

I've found the complete opposite, Rust communities are the least hostile programming environments I've come across.

There's also a huge amount of irony about saying a community is toxic on this site

This is wild to me as someone who spent many years in Haskell and made shit tons of money doing it. There are myriad Haskell jobs available. I'm taking a break right now (mainly to pick up other skills), but would go back to it in a heartbeat. There are lots of Haskell jobs.

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