Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1letterunixname | Hacker News Reader

It's the same shit at Meta. It's developer job security. Random group decides to rewrite in Rust but then breaks their shipped codebase for 3 weeks. They don't care. They have a new toy and don't care if they break things other people use.

View on HN

Listen to them talking about it. This isn’t the sound of rogue group of developers focused on creating job security for themselves

https://youtu.be/8T6ClX-y2AE?t=2607

Developing in rust is so much easier than other languages I've used. Took a while to get the hang of it. It's honestly a wonderful experience. Can blindly follow types or hone in on performance critical areas without sketchy bugs.

I can’t disagree more. I hesitate to hitch my cart to Rust, but rewriting all the old memory unsafe code is an inevitable need. This status quo of just patching things up every time an exploit appears is farcical when we have the tools to address these problems today.

I don't think it is so much about rewriting old code, rather new code is written in Rust.

I don't think it is so much about rewriting old or new code, rather code where security and stability are important is written in Rust.

This is how I feel about devs forcing rust onto web UI development (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35722681). JS exists and people already make new toys (frameworks) for it every month. That's not enough and now we need rust on the frontend

I often advocate for the use of Rust, but it's not the right tool for every job. If one of these conditions is met, I'll happily use Rust:

  - Cannot have garbage collection
  - Need the raw speed of C
  - Need to provide a C interface
  - Already have a lot of Rust code in the project

Having said that, I very much prefer statically typed languages, and ones with a focus on correctness and safety. Rust and Haskell both fit that bill very well.

I care if it's written to be better and cheaper to maintain. I don't care about a new Javascript, Rust, or (latest religion) framework, this or that, unless the approach is better than what came before and it's part of sound governance. Code should not be religious, it should be functional and focused on its purpose.

Thankfully most of that seems self-contained to Reddit/HN in pet projects. My god what a disaster for the web that would be, shoving everything into WASM despite zero performance reason to.

Nobody's forcing anything. This is hacker culture, and it's what drives progress. Get over it.

Hacker culture is great. Hacker culture is less great at work when I have to deal with over-engineered over-abstracted code that's hard to debug and solves simple problems in seemingly simple ways until inevitably you have to dive in and dig deep to figure out wtf is actually happening and good luck (this is how i imagine debugging rust UIs on the web will be)

I'm just ranting. I know in reality not every abstraction is correct and often they introduce more problems than they actually solve, but every once in a while the hackers get it right and that's when progress is made. In the meanwhile us normies have to deal with the experiments of complex bs to solve simple problems

Rust is actually pretty kind about most abstractions. Sure you can write creepy rust, but it requires a lot more effort to write creepy rust than it does in say C. More chances that a code reviewer will say "ugh this is too fancy", whereas in C some pretty crazy stuff can seem so innocent.

if you aren't smart enough to understand it doesn't mean it is "over-engineered over-abstracted"

I think that "let people rewrite stuff in the new cool language/framework" is a deliberate strategy to retain midrange talent.

Because when I think of what would give me the most job security, it's to reimplement something that we already have and works perfectly fine on its own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com