> I do not understand why there are so many zealots around the language.

Neither did I. But then I took the time to learn the language, and I understood what all the hype was about. Maybe you should too, instead of just whining about it.

Many of us program for fun, and Rust is a joy to work with (especially compared to the alternatives in its niche), so we talk about it a lot. Of course, when you need to get serious work done, the most fun and enjoyable tool is not necessarily the one that's best suited to the job.

Being the first language to contest C++ in places like the kernal is a pretty big deal, no? It helps that the borrow checker is a new idea around being safe without gc.

> Other than safety and the like.

I think these are some good points:

https://github.blog/2023-08-30-why-rust-is-the-most-admired-...

On the one hand, "safety" avoids the "use after free" or other bugs which plague programs written in C. For systems programming, that is significant.

On the other hand, the "safety" allows for much easier concurrency.

The higher-level stuff like "pattern matching" is really nice. It's nice enough that it motivated efforts like https://github.com/borgo-lang/borgo

Somewhat implicit is that Rust has enough of a community that there are many good packages/libraries and tools around it.

> Other than safety and the like...

This statement does a lot of work. Safety without compromise in speed on modern architectures is rather valuable. I dont think you understand the importance of that statement and why it is being used in the kernel. Depending on what you do, you may never need to code in rust (I dont) but dont underestimate how much humanity meeds that combination of safety and speed.

It’s a mixed bag. Yes there is a lot of hipster fanboyism. But I’ve also seen a lot of old timers coming from a career in C++ where Rust basically formalizes a lot of best practices and removes a lot of the worst footguns. I see the hope in their miserable faces and so there is definitely something real about Rust – and not necessarily Rust itself, but just the proof of concept of it, that it’s possible to solve many of the problems low-level programmers have just accepted as fact-of-life for a long time.

Me personally I’m not from that background, and coming from higher level languages the selling points are not nearly as compelling given the learning curve and less mature ecosystem around many things. For instance, language performance is rarely the limiting factor in say API/backend development. Usually you have networking, io and databases eating most of your lunch, and also horizontal scaling is typically already in place for other reasons.

Wait... are you saying you have a problem with people liking a thing? That's kind of sad.

I don't know rust, generally don't advocate writing things in rust but I find the people complaining about the people advocating for rust to be completely insufferable. People are talking about it because it's cool and new and shiny and they like it, you see it a lot because there's lots of people who find it cool and new and shiny.