I am not evangelizing for Rust, Golang or anything in particular. I am evangelizing for periodically asking yourself "Am I still using the best tool for the job?" which most people never do.
Maybe it's normal for people to praise something that legitimately solved their problems. I know that happened with me.
But even if it was true (I'd contest it's not) can't you ignore it and judge the language on its merits? We are not teenagers for a long, long time now, we should be making up our own mind about things.
But you denied my right to make up my own mind about Rust based on what its proponents say.
I believe you even attempted to insult me, too bad I don't know what curmudgeon means :)
I have not denied you anything, I implored you to ignore the zealots that exist IN EVERY ECOSYSTEM and judge the thing based on what it can actually do.
Please don't misrepresent what I said, that's not arguing in good faith.
Edit: from what I hear from my peers (translation: other programmers that I have coffee or drinks with), if I started a new server application today and I needed the performance of a compiled language, I should use Go not Rust.
I believe servers are where the propensity of C like languages to allow you to shoot yourself in the foot is the problem, isn't it?
Golang, Rust, Nim, Zig, and a few others are a much better fit nowadays.
Am I supposed to use a tool just because of what it's made of, or because it solves a problem for me?
No embarrassing buffer overflow CVEs is a very good start.
To me that's an actual selling point and I've migrated from almost all UNIX coreutils to Rust alternatives for that reason alone.
> Am I supposed to use a tool just because of what it's made of, or because it solves a problem for me?
No, as an adult you are supposed to not frame the discussion unfairly and ask the right questions.
Are your coreutils replacements 100% drop-in?
Ask people if they used all flags of `sort` and report back results as a test of my hypothesis.
> The right questions according to who?
This is tiring. I told you twice that I'd prefer you engaging in technical merits. You keep drawing attention to what is annoying you but you'll have to talk to your friends and family about that because I am not interested.
Bye.
I tried Rust and downloaded some projects that should be comparatively simple (e.g. text editor). "cargo build" downloaded and built about 500 dependencies. The Rust ecosystem had a chance to convince me, and it sure has some convincing results. But it wasn't my cup of tea.
If you included hundreds of dependencies to do what you can't easily do yourself within the "safe" framework, that may or may not be the language's or the ecosystem's failure. But the attribute "secure" for such a project is questionable. As NPM history or a certain guy or the recent events around the xz project illustrate well.
Number of dependencies is a bad signal for JS projects, I am not so sure the same applies for Rust however.
> This is tiring.
Hey, you're the one keeping the argument going...
I am getting tired of being misinterpreted, not of the argument itself because the argument ended several comments ago and the person focused on being a little rebel ("who gets the determine the right questions" is his favorite pet peeve apparently).
There is no argument currently, just people trying really hard to miss the point that was stated very clearly.
(Or, I suppose, whether we're just talking past each other.)
Mine was that some people needlessly -- and very immaturely -- rebel against using Rust because of something they saw on HN 5 years ago. There's no Rust zealotry here for a long time.
I chased after a few people asking them if they really tried it or they simply resist something because it's gaining popularity.
How dare I? :D
We’re mostly adopting rust to replace our C, to protect us from ourselves. It’s just so much easier to hand off these sort of projects to developers who mainly work with things like Java or C#. Partly because of the memory “safety” but also because things like enums work the way they expect them to being sum types, and so on. It’s also very clear when something is intended not to be mutable. The borrow checker is probably the biggest struggle, where with C, everything is a struggle.
Rust still has a long way to come though, and maybe it’ll never get there. I do think we’ll see an uptake as performance increasingly matters due to cloud costs and ESG. Right now though, I’d argue that unless you know why you “want” to use Rust then maybe you shouldn’t.
As you said, it's a pragmatic but also kinda niche language. I don't reach for it unless I can't do the job with others, easier and quicker to work with languages.
The "religious zeal" was also an important reason why I switched back to C from C++ and why I don't have much interest in Rust. I can't quite stand the "holier than thou" attitude in.parts of those communities.
This is 100% baffling to me. Let me explain.
1. Every single area has zealots. Yours included. And we're not talking only work. Every hobby area as well.
2. What the attitude of the most toxic 0.1% of the users of a thing is has exactly ZERO correlation with whether the thing is good and worth using.
3. By resisting only those 0.1% toxic zealots you are only demonstrating meaningless rebelliousness. As a supposed adult you should be immune to what are people hyping up and form your own opinion. INFORMED opinion. Not one based on the "many people praise it hence I, the intellectual, will stay far away from that obvious nonsense" stance.
4. Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, Rust is praised because it's actually good? Have you considered that the Rust community is not trying to cheat its way into your heart, and that the love Rust gets is justified by the people who need its features? Seems like you did not, and that's disappointing.
In other words, I have zero clue of your thought process here, maybe you can help me understand?
Back in my home town the VW Golf had an ardent fan base, yet one of my friends still bought one after he graduated. He didn't call the people who loved VW Golf zealots. He did his research and concluded that with his budget and mechanic skills the VW Golf is the ideal option.
Food for thought?
The VWs you can just dump on the fans.
I know, I live in a similar country.
Wink wink.
I am assuming that you did your own research, formed your own informed opinion, and ignored the feedback nevertheless because you know who is right :-)
I don't even use Rust for a while now, by the way, because its lower speed of iteration was an ill fit for my contracting work. I love what it's doing but it is not a silver bullet (but then again, what is?).
...and by the way, mental exhaustion is pretty much a given if you are a pro. That's one of the reasons we are paid gobs of money.
As for the "feedback" you are alluding to, it's more like people throwing feces at me but feel free to disagree. None of them have addressed my questions except maybe one. They all rushed into snark just like you did. Even 1000 such comments are not interesting or informed feedback and can't advance any discussion.
I am still here and still open to discuss... with the people who bother to discuss.
And it's such endless circular discussion where the extremists show up (I guess the equivalent in Rust is shaming projects that use unsafe, IIRC there have been quite a few dramas in the past). Shit like this is simply mentally exhausting, and in now 7 years of C as my main language I did not encounter this even once). In general C coders seems to be a quite relaxed, happy and tolerant bunch.
You also addressed almost zero of what I said and asked you.
What's quite obvious when watching from the outside is that it's almost always people with a crab emoji in their profile who are more likely to talk shit about C programmers (myself included in a couple of cases via subtweeting).
I usually just shrug it off and move on, because what else is there to do?
FYI I did the same because the kind of work that I do does not desperately need Rust's benefits.
But I'll always call out biased and prejudiced people and I don't care about what the HN group-think believes.
> I usually just shrug it off and move on, because what else is there to do?
1. Stop thinking that the zealots are representative of... anything at all, really. (I don't include myself in that group of zealots. I get ticked off by bias and firmly held preconceived notions. That's why I commented as much in the entire sub-thread started by me.)
2. Do your own research like you did.
3. Refuse to think about trolls and zealots. Which is what all of us as healthy adults in this attention-predatory age of the internet should do.
I don’t use rust because I don’t have enough time in my life right now for discovering a new language just for the pleasure of it and even if I had, my real alternatives would be functional languages, not rust vs C++ which I use daily in a big project that has incentives stacked into C++ favor
I've already made my points several times. If you don't engage on the concrete arguments and are trying to be vaguely argumentative without substance then you're kind of polluting the replies.
Here's what should be a food for thought for you.
Also, you behaved quite rudely as well as counterproductively - to the point that, if I felt any investment in the Rust community, I would now be asking you please to stop trying to represent it, at least until you can do so competently enough not to embarrass those you purport to defend.
If I found I'd erred as you have, it would bother me a lot. How you handle it is, happily for me, not my problem. But now at least you can't say you've never been told.
You're the perfect example of biased and tunnel-visioned. Textbook example even.
Think what you will. Unfortunately for you, future readers will make up their own mind and not all will land at your defective conclusion.
Signed, - future reader
Diving into the ruins of Usenet, or UNIX/C literature, will provide enough examples.
Because they're the ones that we keep hearing from right now. When it was the Haskell zealots showing up every few days, they were annoying. When it was the Lisp zealots, they were annoying.
If you could theoretically swap out the entire back-end of a programming language, and hypothetically you did that to C# by allowing developers to write C# styling and syntax that could be compiled to Rust, it would probably not be a big loss. The type primitives would be an apples-apples comparison at best, or "Rust is just better" if you really scrutinized the types closely. Where does that leave the rest of the language? A better regex implementation? Rust would probably win. A better GUI experience? Rust is speedily approaching usable APIs there at the same time Microsoft is trying to sunset the best they had.
I wonder if F# could be rebased on top of Rust...