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Comment by datadeft | Hacker News Reader

Rust is for people who stick around, can come over hurdles, can take in new concepts and see the overall benefits. It has a steep learning curve that pays off.

For me there are three reasons why Rust is suitable for many usecases:

- performance

- safety

- static binary compilation with targeting different cpu architecture

After spending majority of my time with Python and Java in the last 10 years these are things i really learned to appreciate.

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> Rust is for people who stick around, can come over hurdles, can take in new concepts and see the overall benefits

Speaking as someone who is learning Rust and really liking it, I just want to note that this comment is sort of emblematic of what is wrong with the Rust community. It comes off as pretty condescending—"Rust is for the people who are smart and don't give up easily, if you're less smart or give up easily you should really go find a language for wimps".

Sorry i do not want to sound condescending. I was just explaining my own experience. The first time I wanted to learn Rust I failed because I gave up.

Performance and static binary compilation are available in 40-year-old languages, not forgetting Dlang, which is the central topic of this post.

The only reason left to really use Rust is safety.

And the safety reason is also fulfilled with Ada/SPARK2014 as an alternative to Rust with a longer legacy in high-integrity applications.

Performance isn’t a problem for Java for just about any business application most programmers will work on and, if it is, you can usually figure out how to optimize Java to hit your performance target. Safety is also not a problem in Java. And fat jars remain the single best way to deploy an application I’ve seen in just about any ecosystem (and nix is working out pretty well to bring their benefits to the rest of the programming world).

Even better than fat jars are jlink‘ed images, maybe even wrapped in a nice shell using jpackage. Bundling the JDK and stripping it of unneeded modules eliminates so many types of issues. All courtesy of your JDK.

I have the exact opposite experience. In fact for a while I lived on optimizing Java projects to meet with performance numbers even my junior Rust code can beat easily. Most Java devs have no idea how to write performant software.

Hopefully with Valhalla landing, memory footprint can also go down enough.

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