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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> With the danger of hurting HN Rust hipsters... Language does not matter (sorry guys).

There are also a lot of Rust haters, and people unwilling to change.

From the Cloudflare blog:

>> We chose Rust as the language of the project because it can do what C can do in a memory safe way without compromising performance.

So in their opinion language choice matters. I'm not a Rust hipster, but I do believe in the promises the language makes. Assuming they didn't write any unsafe Rust it's pretty much assured that the new proxy contains ZERO bugs of certain types. See what I did there? I made a (contingent) assertion about the non-existence for entire classes of bugs in a code-base I have not seen, based on the language it is written in. So from that point of view Language does matter.

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What hurt rust is the fanboys

Look at the original title:

"How we built Pingora, the proxy that connects Cloudflare to the Internet"

And look what's being reported "rust-written", it's not the case with any other languages, and that's why some people are against it, because fanboyism takes over rational decisions

Nobody mention the language for the countless new AI/ML based projects

When go was the hip new language, you saw this same basic comment here all the time, replacing rust with go.

It didn't seem to hurt the language much.

Your account was created 15 years ago. The account you were replying to was created 60 days ago.

People who’ve been here a while remember when “written in Go” was appended to everything. When “we decided to rewrite X in Go” would show up every other week. The new thing is going to get attention from people who haven’t used it but are interested.

In a few years we’ll have new accounts complaining that there are too many articles about Carbon or whatever is new then.

Rust is the new thing?

Case in point. Rust is eternal. Rewrite it all in Rust and you will be rewarded in the afterlife.

The "written in rust" has gotten to the point where I notice myself treating it the same as any other spam/ad. Turned me off from learning the language, which is a shame.

It's really a shame that you won't learn the language because there are a lot of fans. Maybe it would be worth considering that this may be more than just hype. Especially now that the Linux Kernel may be adopting Rust, and most of the big tech companies are building new projects in Rust.

Go's approach to massive parallelism, Erlang and the supervisor/actor model, Rust and it's borrow-checker. These are all milestones in programming language development. There's a reason for the hype.

The issue for me is the type of fans and not the quantity. They give a sense of the community surrounding the language. My free time is limited and I've been spoiled by active involvement with a few open source communities that have been spectacular. To me, the community is as important as the project.

The reason for hype is attention economy and aggressive marketing.

Attention economy in case of programming language? Is it really?

I find it bit ironic that this is written under topic of "rust hipsters" because your comment reminds me defining feature of hipsters: turned off by hype.

That’s a strange decision making strategy. What did you do when everyone around you was taking the Covid vaccine? Did you decide to skip it because too many people were recommending it?

Comparing my decision to not learn a specific technology in my free time because a very vocal subset of its community is off putting to COVID tells me two things. 1. Using such a false equivalency means you have no actual argument against my decision making strategy, 2. You're likely part of the subset.

I’ve met people who decide not to do things because they feel like they’re being forced into it when they receive too many recommendations.

So someone saying “oh $language is great, it worked really well for me” is clearly upsetting you. I thought “$vaccine has boosted my chances of survival with minimal side effects” might have upset you as well.

The original blog post from Cloudflare [1] is titled "How we built Pingora, the proxy that connects Cloudflare to the Internet". The linked Phoronix article decided to use an overly hyped and editorialized title.

Having "written in Rust" needlessly slapped on to HN, reddit, and other content farm post titles doesn't make me feel like I'm being forced to learn it. It gives the Rust community more of a MLM vibe with the need of the hype crew to talk it up to validate their decision to use it and they're trying to sell me something.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t...

> make me feel like I'm being forced to learn it.

I’m sorry you feel that way. You shouldn’t feel like you’re being forced to learn anything.

That said the MLM interpretation is the least charitable one possible. A bunch of people excited about a new technology need not have malicious intent when they’re taking about it. Maybe they’re just excited.

Excluding the "Doesn't" from your quote to negate my words is very deceitful. Do better.

I misread what you said. That was my mistake. I’m sorry.

Again I request, please don’t assume that mistakes happen out of malice. There was no deceit in what I did.

Suppose I made this mistake on purpose. What advantage could I possibly have gotten from it? Nothing. My only purpose here was to have a discussion in good faith.

If you’re going into conversations assuming bad faith and deceit and ulterior motives of strangers, don’t be surprised if your biases are confirmed.

No one is forcing you to learn anything even if Rust is successful in the future. You see vocal 'fan-boys' OK. On the other hand it is really strange that under every 'Rust' post there are few very vocal comments hating on Rust. If you are not interested just ignore Rust posts. If you need to criticize, do it. But it would be more fruitful if it is something more than this vague formalism made by people bothered by title.

> No one is forcing you to learn anything even if Rust is successful in the future

Agreed, which is why I explicitly stated that I don't feel like I'm being forced to learn it. You might be making the wrong assumption given the other person's blatantly deceitful replies.

Posts that are editorialized, shilling, ad/spam, or any of the other class of HN doesn't want you to do that type of posts, regardless of if it's about Rust should have the community call it out in comments.

To be clear, I don't hate the Rust language. It has a few features that I find appealing and there are posts about Rust that I feel worth worth the read. The cult like evangelizing and editorializing is what I dislike and makes some, including me, not want to engage with Rust's community.

Funny you should bring up that question. I was recently told, "You know when every government in the world is pushing a vaccination that it must be a trap."

Strange decision-making strategy, indeed.

Zig seems like a good alternative to Rust for those of us who yearn for a better C anyhow.

Agreed. Zig was the language I decided to focus on instead of rust.

> And look what's being reported "rust-written", it's not the case with any other languages

It's a phase.

"Written in Rust"

"I use Arch btw"

"Googler. Opinions are my own."

And I'm pretty sure Haskell had a situation like this a while ago.

This too shall pass.

> "Googler. Opinions are my own."

When commenting employer this is legally responsible and also a disclosure of your biases.

For you it is about fanboys. For me it is direct utility. If there was no 'Rust' in the title I would miss it in my RSS feed. While I do have also filters for specific tech fields not language related - here I can find, for example, what is used in the production for this specific language I'm interested in.

I just have to learn now not to look in the comment section, which is not only off-topic but actually arguing why even this topic exists.

Language choice doesn’t matter when you have a correct and fast program. The trick is getting there.

>> Language choice doesn’t matter when you have a correct and fast program. The trick is getting there.

Language choice can influence how fast or slow you get there, and also the level of certainty you have. Again, Rust guarantees certain bugs and race conditions do not exist, so in a sense we START from there and never have to worry about "getting there".

If I had ham, I could make ham and eggs, if I had eggs.

You’re begging the question.

That was the point of the second sentence. The trick is getting there.

> Assuming they didn't write any unsafe Rust it's pretty much assured that the new proxy contains ZERO bugs of certain types.

And assuming that the libraries you depend on also don't have any `unsafe` bugs. This is something people seem to forget when discussing rust. And "the unsafe is well tested" sounds similar to "this legacy C code is well tested". I like rust the language but have consistently negative experiences with evangelists.

Here are some other things that make rust a good choice for developing low level systems:

- Zero cost abstractions like in C++

- A strong type system (and lifetime annotations built into the language, less need for the grind tools)

- In general a stricter language than C++ with far less legacy options

- Newer language with a de facto package manager and build system

There's a lot to like about rust without just saying it's "safer" which is highly nuanced and people seemingly never actually go into the details. I've had many negative votes for even suggesting than C is currently a better choice for Linux Kernel development compared to Rust. People will just say "Rust is safer" and that's the end of the conversation...

"This legacy C code" usually has millions of lines. "The unsafe parts" are usually on the few dozens.

The safety is also conditional on rustc not having bugs, and your computer working correctly. But you don't get to pretend those are as risky as some large random, less used C code.

Not only that but also the clear boundary of responsibility. If there’s a way to use a library in safe Rust that cause UAF, that’s the library problem. In C, it’s because you are using it wrong.

> and people unwilling to change

I mean the guy used clojure, a functional lispy language with emphasis on immutability. It's as "change embracing" as it gets in webdev when phrases like LAMP stack, MEAN stack are the norm.

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