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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I believe that the fanatics in the rust community were the biggest factor. They turned me off what eventually became a decent language. There are some language particulars that were strange choices, but I get that if you want to start over you will try to get it all right this time around. But where the Go authors tried to make the step easy and kept their ego out of it, it feels as if the rust people aimed at creating a new temple rather than to just make a new tool. This created a massive chicken-and-the-egg problem that did not help adoption at all. Oh, and toolchain speed. For non-trivial projects for the longest time the rust toolchain was terribly slow.

I don't remember any other language's proponents actively attacking the users of other programming language.

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> But where the Go authors tried to make the step easy and kept their ego out of it

That is very different to my memories of the past decade+ of working on Go.

Almost every single language decision they eventually caved on that I can think of (internal packages, vendoring, error wrapping, versioning, generics) was preceded by months if not years of arguing that it wasn't necessary, often followed by an implementation attempt that seems to be ever so slightly off just out of spite.

Let's don't forget that the original Go 1.0 expected every project's main branch to maintain backward compatibility forever or else downstreams would break, and without hacks (which eventually became vendoring) you could not build anything without an internet connection.

To be clear, I use Go (and C... and Rust) and I do like it on the whole (despite and for its flaws) but I don't think the Go authors are that different to the Rust authors. There are (unfortunately) more fanatics in the Rust community but I think there's also a degree to which some people see anything Rust-related as being an attack on other projects regardless of whether the Rust authors intended it to be that way.

Fair enough.

> I believe that the fanatics in the rust community were the biggest factor.

I second this; for a few years it was impossible to have any sort of discussion on various programming places when the topic was C: the conversation would get quickly derailed with accusations of "dinosaur", etc.

Things have gone quiet recently (last three years, though) and there have been much fewer derailments.

As an outsider, I don't really see Rust having done anything different recently than they weren't doing from the start.

What seems to have changed in recent years is the buy-in from corporations that seemingly see value in its promises of safety. This seems to be paired with a general pulling back of corporate support from the C++ world as well as a general recession of fresh faces, a change that at least from the sidelines seems to be mostly down to a series of standards committee own-goals.

I'm not sure that there is a recession of corporate support from C++. Just that the proportion of companies that need C++ is smaller than it once was.

I like the safety promise of Rust. But the complicated interop story with C and C++ hurt it a lot. I mean, in a typical codebase, what proportion of bugs will be memory-safety related vs other reasons? Ideally, we could just wrap the safety-critical bits in a memory-safe wrapper and continue to use C and C++ for everything else.

Being a C++ developer and trafficking mostly in C++ spaces, there is a phenomenon I've noticed that I've taken to calling Rust Derangement Syndrome. It's where C and C++ developers basically make Rust the butt of every joke, and make fun it it in a way that is completely outsized with how much they interact with Rust developers in the wild.

It's very strange to witness. Annoying advocacy of languages is nothing new. C++ was at one point one of those languages, then it was Java, then Python, then Node.js. I feel like if anything, Rust was a victim of a period of increased polarization on social media, which blew what might have been previously seen as simple microaggressions completely out of proportion.

I don't think Rust will ever be as big as C++ because there were fewer options back then.

These days Go/Zig/Nim/C#/Java/Python/JS and other languages are fast enough for most use cases.

And Rust learning curve doesn't help either. C++ was basically C with OOP on steroids. Rust is very different.

I say that because I wouldn't group Rust opposition with any of those languages you cited. It's different for mostly different reasons and magnitudes.

As someone that was there, a few things helped C++ adoption, and even then it wasn't without the C vs C++ flamewars that endure to these days.

- At the time, with a few minor differences, C++ was Typescript for C, thus very easy to adopt into existing projects

- Being born on the same birthplace as C and UNIX, meant all C compiler vendors saw as added value to have it as part of their offering, and it was natural that every UNIX SDK also had C++ support available alongside C.

- Apple, Metrowerks, IBM, Borland and Microsoft helped to push C++ adoption, by making it the official way to use application frameworks. MacApp (originally in Object Pascal), PowerPlant, CSet++, Turbo Vision/OWL/VCL, and MFC respectively.

This kept C++ as the language to go for performance in enterprise computing, while Delphi and VB got the "easy" development role, until Java and .NET took over all those frameworks.

Rust doesn't have this kind of industry wide push, even in OSes where it is being embraced like Windows and Android, note that it isn't being pushed as yet another way to write userspace applications, rather low level OS services.

> Rust doesn't have this kind of industry wide push, even in OSes where it is being embraced like Windows and Android, note that it isn't being pushed as yet another way to write userspace applications, rather low level OS services.

This seems apropos in a world where C++ has been bleeding userspace buy-in for longer than I've been professionally programming.

I started learning Rust a few months ago in an attempt to teach an old dog new tricks, and while it's quite pleasant as far as it went, I can think of several classes of programs that I would be reluctant to use the language for. But I wouldn't dream of using C++ for those types of programs either.

There are rumors floating around that Microsoft is rolling their own rustc-codegen-gcc paired with their C2 codegen backend. Don't know what to make of those rumors, but it helped to reassure me to feel like the time I invested thus far hasn't been wasted.

Not sure about the new backend, but they are indeed quite invested.

"From Blue Screens to Orange Crabs: Microsoft's Rusty Revolution"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDtMuS7BExE

Software vulnerabilities are an implicit form of harassment.

I'm hoping that's meant to satirise the rust community, because it's horseshit like this that makes a sizeable subset of rust evangelists unbearable.

> I don't remember any other language's proponents actively attacking the users of other programming language.

I just saw someone on Hacker News saying that Rust was a bad language because of its users

Yawn. Really, if you have nothing to say don't do it here.

Gotcha hypocrisy might be a really cheap thing to point out, but they're not wrong.

I have noticed my fair share of Rust Derangement Syndrome in C++ spaces that seems completely outsized from the series of microaggressions that they eventually point out when asked "Why?"

It’s interesting, over the past 15 years I’ve had occasion to work with other c/c++ devs on various contracts, probably 50ish distinct different companies. Not once has rust even come up in casual conversation.

I'm probably a little younger than you, so it's likely a generational thing. I also notice it's a lot more pervasive in internet-driven watercoolers than face to face.

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