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Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

Towards general mental health. I'm just a C# wage slave, and I'll admit, when being prompted, that my language, its vendor, its runtime environment, and its general approach are, to put it kindly, flawed.

However, as evidenced by the arguments and voting in this thread, Rust proponents will take no criticism, whatsoever.

I linked to a GitHub repository that documents many, many instances in which generally safe Rust causes UB.

The same kind of UB that recently hit one of my coworkers, caused a 3-day outage and now (despite all my counseling to the contrary!) will burn them out permanently.

My only request: can you guys please back off just a little bit? Programming is already hard enough without the purity wars you're stoking all the time...

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Stoking language flame wars based on hysterical exaggeration has never promoted mental health.

to be fair, from his perspective, it's often the rusty crowd who is stoking the flame wars - this sounds like a reaction to them.

how often do we hear something like "C and C++ are horribly flawed and completely unsafe. it's basically a crime against humankind and gross negligence to use them"?

i get weary of that kind of thing too. i wouldn't approach it by reacting in the same way as the GP comment, but i get it. and it's not really that much of a strawman. it's more exasperation and sarcasm.

personally, i'm very interested in rust. but everytime someone at best "overhypes" it or at worse, outright dogs on other languages, it's a negative point toward dealing with the whole rust ecosystem.

In all honesty, I don't see that sort of thing posted except maybe the overly naive excited "omg I love rust" post in /r/rust from someone just learning it which no one should be taking as credible.

I do, however, see people trot out the oft-repeated "rust evangelists want to rewrite everything in rust" or "rust people say programming C++ is a crime against humanity", but it seems to me that's the only place I see this argument. In other words, it's a simple strawman.

I don’t buy it.

People can, in the most neutral way possible, point out facts about how safe or unsafe Rust is compared to C and C++. People will STILL complain about how the Rust zealots are bullying their language. This is how it plays out every time.

You can look at this thread. The “exasperation and sarcasm“ is stupid and one-sided. “But” they always say “that’s just a reaction to a previous debate”–because the Rust zealots are always in the rear-view mirror, never in front of them.

How about complaining about something in Rust… that is bad? Like how un-ergonomic Async is? Or how pointy and awkward the syntax can be? Instead they choose to fight the losing battle over how C and Rust are equally unsafe or how actually Rust’s safety doesn’t matter, depending on the phase of the moon. Then they whine about tone and zealotry when they realize arguing against Rust safety from the C and C++ side is a losing battle and they have run out of arguments.

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