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Comment by skhameneh | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it.

This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.

I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).

I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.

I'm not a Rust contributor and I don't care for some of the challenges that come with Rust, but I love what it accomplished and I find it does it very well. Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.

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> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.

You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission here on HN for years.

Seriously. Yesterday there was a thread about a use-after-free bug in OpenBSD and despite BSD predating Rust by decades there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust (as though Rust would even protect you from all memory errors in a kernel project where you'd inevitably need to write unsafe Rust anyways!). Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.

> there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust

Please provide a link to this comment.

Someone asked an honest question and got reasonable responses that were informative. At no point did anyone chide the project for not using Rust.

> Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.

Nah, people complaining about the supposed toxic community are noisier than the supposed toxic community.

You have an awful low bar for what is considered chiding, damn

Then again, your very username implies an indulgence in viewing technology through the lens of fandoms which is... weird

I read the comment that they were referring to and it wasn't even constructive conversation in the thread.

It was basically a complete derail to backdoor in a conversation about why they think everything should be in Rust.

OpenBSD still uses CVS, C and Make because that's what works for them. They will continue to keep using C, Make and CVS but that enables them to be productive with the contributors that they have. Moving things to other languages will not increase their productivity. That's the biggest thing that the largely-fanatical Rust evangelists completely fail to understand.

It's easy to hate on LLM slop code but it seems that using it for analysis only could give a C codebase a much stronger security posture. Running fable and friends could give rust-like security with C portability and familiarity.

“A complete derail” is doing some heavy lifting there.

This is a wide ranging discussion board, not the OpenBSD forums. That shit is fair game even if you don’t like it.

(It’s annoying, sure - because dev tribalism is the most played out thing in this industry - but overall the topic can be an interesting discussion point)

there's plenty of Rust posts to talk about Rust.

I come to an OpenBSD post to talk about OpenBSD. Rust isn't even really tangentially related.

Then do it in the litany of comment sub-threads and stop complaining about one that's a Rust tangent.

Welcome to forums, we've been using them for a few decades now.

Seek help.

You need to write some unsafe code in a kernel, but most of the code does not have to be, which allows you to eliminate memory unsafety from almost all code and give more scrutiny to the parts the compiler cannot guarantee for you. I don’t know though if the affected code in openbsd would have needed to be unsafe. Moving towards rust is a possible way for kernels as Linux has shown, but I guess for OpenBSD the pros and cons are different, as it’s striving for a more minimal system and has been affected far less by memory unsafety issues.

> You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission

Which is what C++ enthusiasts have done to C enthusiasts and C enthusiasts have done to assembly enthusiasts.

If people would just take the time to actually learn and appreciate the Analytical Engine they could bypass _all_ that noise...

I’m rather partial to Plankalkül actually

The entire concept of publicity as a competition is baffling to me. Who gives a shit?

More Rust users = more Rust libraries = more Rust jobs = more places to do what you enjoy and get paid for it.

That seems like a train of thought so thin as to be anorexic. I think that many erm coding enthusiasts simply have issues with emotional regulation.

By that definition, Javascript is by far the bestest language in the world ;)

It is! It just happens to be one of the worst languages in the world too.

Not trying to derail the discussion, but the reason for me to leave the Rust ecosystem in favor of Go was also the implied culture.

Experienced Go devs that stay inside the ecosystem try to write their libraries as "pure go" libraries with zero dependencies other than the upstream core libraries (or golang.org/x if needbe), which results in a very low maintenance ecosystem. This combined with the strong toolchain makes it joyful to work with.

I still don't agree with a lot of design choices of the language, but I realize that I can be more efficient if I am setting aside my opinion.

And that's exactly the thing that somehow never happened in the Rust ecosystem. I always joke that the Rust ecosystem has more OpenGL bindings than developers, because there's just so many low quality bindings or wrappers out there that the ecosystem in result got too noisy to maintain.

I don't want to write more (verbose) code. I want to write less.

I kind of already know that my comment goes to shit in terms of downvotes, but that's what I expect while writing this. How dare I criticized Rust as a language? How dare I, a fulltime noob, do this? Rust is better, always!

...the Rust ecosystem is just so effing toxic. I am glad that I left it. I just got tired of being angry at random online things all the time. Go is my happy place where my annoyances are reduced to Cgo, maps, and the unsafe package <3

There is also many compile to Go languages today, that add many befefits from the MLs with still 100% Go interrop. I would say lisette is probably the one that has most momentum right now.

> And that's exactly the thing that somehow never happened in the Rust ecosystem. I always joke that the Rust ecosystem has more OpenGL bindings than developers, because there's just so many low quality bindings or wrappers out there that the ecosystem in result got too noisy to maintain.

Rust seems to attract a lot of horizontal programming. I have done mainly that so far and I LOVE Rust for it.

AIUI, horizontal programming is fully building out each abstraction before you start building on top of it, as opposed to vertical programming, which generally seeks to accomplish the task as directly and straightforwardly as possible, and only abstract if needed.

This leads to things like the proliferation of bindings, abstraction layers, frameworks etc. with little downstream users to show for it. And often little influence from experience using them. Sometimes very technically impressive but otherwise not always fleshed out to the point of being practically usable.

I am sure there's tons of toxicity all over the place too but I chalk it up to differing mindsets / patterns of development.

As much as I'm put away by the dependency horror I've seen in many Rust projects, this is an interesting observation.

There are many dependency horrors of Rust, especially in larger projects, but I will say I've never been particularly put off by community-maintained crates that are free to make breaking changes for correctness or flexibility. Things like `temporal-rs` feel like a huge win, even given the long tail of crates with outdated dependencies (or overly-rigid APIs, etc.), and I tend to agree with Rust's smaller standard library.

For example, std's linked list seems rarely useful for anything but scripting, and could've easily been a crate. I don't think it's egregious or anything, it's just a bit meh. I don't really use Rust for scripting though (I usually use zsh or TypeScript), so maybe it's super valuable in specific cases.

> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.

Then why is it weird if you're saying the same thing? Different programming languages appeal to programmers with different tastes, and so it makes sense that some programmers would be drawn to language X and dislike language Y, while others would be the opposite.

The year is 2026 and the only thing about coding that matters anymore is taste.

Edit: Thought about scare quoting “taste”

It's not necessarily the thing that matters most to executives, who are often those making decisions, but it's always been the thing that mattered most to programmers (at least those of them who have any emotions or strong preferences toward programming languages).

Pretty sure you could have said the same in 1986 and I know for sure you could have in 2006. Not sure why you think people having different tastes is new.

People also stopped coding in 2006?

Always have been. When something is your primary tool, you develop strong opinion about it. Code is notation, helping to describe solutions. Not everyone thinks and solve the same way, so strong preferences is not unusual.

Different tastes are aguable the only reason why different programming languages exist. They're all Turing complete after all.

Maybe it's even the other way around: different cultures and tastes give birth to different languages and community norms around them.

This is a good take. I was interested in accomplishing my goals and had an interest in both Rust and Zig. Going in, Rust was already proven to meet my needs and I was exploring Zig. Everything being centered around anti-Rust and “better than Rust” without meeting my needs made it a non-starter, it got in the way of discussing the languages themselves.

When was this? I've only seen this "anti-rust" vibe in the past few weeks, guess triggered by the Bun rewrite. Zig people usually will tell you to use the right tool for the job over shilling the language or that you don't need to use it yet (if you want a stable language/documentation) the language will be there if you want to check it in a few years.

Approximately 5 years ago

I have definitely witnessed very specific cultures around languages I really like that I generally just don't vibe with. The author creates something brilliant, but there's a cadre of early adopters that shape a political and somewhat egotistical community that rubs me wrong. Once I spot them, I don't engage with the community. And it's not even that I disagree with the politics they espouse... I'm usually on the same page, but it's just kind of exhausting and a little over the top.

I'm old-ish though and grew up apolitical, so I'm sure it's just a me problem.

In the case of Ruby, the contrast between the early community pre-Rails and what came after is astounding. Partly comes down to the personality differences between Matz and DHH, I guess. I loved the community pre-2005 and had no interest in engaging with it afterward (although I used Rails for a few personal projects).

This example is one of the more striking cases and you could write a (light) novel on the history of how it changed.

You kind of had to be there for part of it, at least the early stuff though.

Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? I’ve seen so many dogmatic views of those Rust apostles here on HN and Linked who think Rust is the only valuable language and all the others - Python, Go, C++ (of course) - are rubbish. I am so fed up with those snobbish views of a few Rust lovers and as much as I love the language I want to avoid those ignorant fucks.

> Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks?

In fairness, Loris Cro is “VP of Community at Zig Software Foundation” so if there’s someone to judge the community by, Loris has more weight than just about anyone (perhaps excluding Andrew Kelly).

Note I am not agreeing with your parent post, what I have seen from Loris and Andrew makes me interested in trying Zig.

I feel this way about most Hashi tools, they just seem massively overrated to me.

Ghostty is fine I guess, I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features.

Zig is fine, has some cool stuff, the community seems roughly the same as the rust, with again just way less features.

The rest of the hashi tools are fine, I don’t really use any of them anymore. Vault was a big deal at some point I guess

That's so dismissive, the HashiCorp products were a game changer in a world that had very little, Vault and Terraform are super widely used

Ah yeah… it was so fun when vault wouldn't let me store a 4096bit private key because it was too long, so I had to use 2048bit one instead. Peak software engineering right there.

did you look cool using it though?

i was an early vagrant user, a long time tf user, and 3 year nomad/consul user. but have moved on. cf now for aws & gcloud cli in scripts for gcp. and eks/gke instead of nomad.

Vault can seem niche however it’s used a lot in high assurance environments given it is easily integrated with Thales HSMs and has FIPS compliance

>niche

Literally all companies I've worked for a know about use Vault for storing secrets to be used during deployment.

It would be interesting to learn that this is different elsewhere.

Yes, we always use the vault/secrets infrastructure of the respective cloud vendor.

Never used the product Vault.

Yeah, I kind of failed to realise that some (many?) companies literally build around one of the cloud vendors.

If in Cloud, then go Cloud native. No reason to run Vault. But on prem, there are limited options and Vault fits the bill.

If you want auto unseal with HSM and don't have to worry about the unseal key shards, then you can hook it up the HSM. Of course, HSMs are expensive and you also have to buy a Vault license.

Oh, I never thought about the "in Cloud" part.

What features from iterm do you miss? I’ve found ghostty to be more performant and aesthetically pleasing and haven’t missed anything

I have discovered Ghostty only this year, and I have switched to it a few months ago.

For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators. I have used for long time intervals at least 8 or 9 video terminal emulators, from the original xterm until the one used immediately before ghostty, which was kitty (and including Konsole, the Gnome terminal, the XFCE terminal, WezTerm and others).

I consider Ghostty the best video terminal emulator that I have used. For now, I have not encountered any noticeable bug yet, even if I spend a lot of time using it.

Nor have I encountered any feature that I really miss (though a few things that worked in other emulators, do not work, at least not with the default configuration, e.g. setting the title of a tab window with the standard escape sequence of characters; but the ghostty titles are fine, i.e. the pwd value while in shell and the invoked command otherwise).

I do not doubt that there may exist some bugs or missing features, but it seems unlikely that they can be seen during typical workflows. I have used it only in Linux, so I do not know anything about bugs under macOS.

I use the terminal that happens to be at hand, which is usually the one that ships with the OS, or the one in VSCode. I don't have high demands on the terminal, and I don't understand what problems are there to solve, as long as it handles unicode and control sequences correctly.

> I don't understand what problems are there to solve, as long as it handles unicode and control sequences correctly.

It turns out its not 1986 anymore, and sometimes we want to output gasp images to our terminals

Huh. I never knew that was a thing. Although sounds cool. Though if you do that, or take something like a ncurses UI, and start turning it into something nicer, at what point do you have something that's not a terminal?

But I guess there's promise in having something that's like a Jupyter notebook, but for files.

Yeah, I mean, a well-designed GUI is hard to beat, but for one-off tools/scripts, being able to dump images to the terminal is often really nice

We could already do that in 1986, outside UNIX.

>I consider Ghostty the best video terminal emulator that I have used. For now, I have not encountered any noticeable bug yet, even if I spend a lot of time using it.

Is there a way to encounter an unnoticeable bug?

>I do not doubt that there may exist some bugs or missing features, but it seems unlikely that they can be seen during typical workflows.

Boyoboyoboy. It seems that you have never heard of the concept of combinatorial explosion, which in software testing, means that due to the zillions of different execution paths, plenty of bugs, which are undetected, can still exist, and can very easily not be found by just one lone ranger using some software package, no matter how long they use it, at least within a few years.

>For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators.

Were you using that great number of emulators serially, or parallely, in those decades?

If parallely, you must have spend less time on each, than "for decades" implies.

If serially, you must have spent a great number of decades to use a great number of emulators.

This seems like a hastily put together comment.

> I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features.

Hmm... I'm using ghostty (on macOS) since it was released and have yet to encounter a single bug. Iterm2 simply got too fat and slow over time, which was the point where I went terminal-shopping (first wezterm, which is also fine, now sticking with ghostty).

I was experiencing daily crashes of ghostty on mac with no crash report, always during claude sessions, and after the crash, I'd lose my session. Though, now we can cmd+f to search ghostty output as of the most recent version.

You’re making it seem like fewer features is a negative, but that’s not always the case. Even for programming languages, I can think of how I semi-regularly see people lamenting that Swift got too complex, while praising Go for being a small language.

I’ve worked with people who I appreciate for their unapologetic willingness to be who they are. I might not agree with their opinions and think they’re a little extreme, but I’m glad people like them exist and enjoy seeing what they devote their time to. Based on the rest of Mitchell’s response, I think something like that is what is appreciated about Zig.

I don’t use Zig, and frequently use Rust, but I’ve never really interacted with the core development team for either. I don’t think it’s necessary to care about whatever culture is driving development once it has sufficient velocity. The Rust I use today is more than enough for my needs. Maybe if I were more involved in open source I would better understand why culture matters, but unfortunately I’m mostly a consumer of it, not a producer.

> Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.

In hindsight (and at risk of starting a flame war), it's easier to be magnanimous when you are winning/have won.

Is it a competition? I wonder if the Zig people feel as though it is, because I doubt the Rust people do.

Rust's big tentpole is "no memory management bugs, everything must be provably safe", whereas Zig is very proud of "no memory management, you have full control but you have to exercise it". I don't feel as though these are competing for the same audience or mindshare.

I've used Zig a big (while trying to contribute to ghostty, at least), and it's an interesting language that I like the aesthetics of but I don't want to use. I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).

> I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).

I share your complaints about the tools you came to Rust from, but the philosophy of not letting you go off script is great until it doesn't work for you. A lot of the reason some of us use the more flexible languages is because we've been in situations where a language and its ecosystem either won't let you do something outright or not without significant pain. Often when everything is on fire and your customers are cancelling contracts. You can't afford to wait for the core team or community to come in and save you in these situations.

Having access to work around your problems is also the source of a lot of the pain you're talking about, but at least you get to stay in business to solve that problem tomorrow.

To a very large degree, a lot of the Rust evangelists that I encounter in the wild are either hobbyists, academics or paid open source contributors at large companies. Most of the discussions I've seen wrt Rust at companies with actual deliverables stop at "Rust? Absolutely not.". Except for a very narrow set of systems where you want the kind of guarantees that Rust provides as a primary feature. For more general situations, the tradeoffs often aren't worth it.

Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress throughout all of technology.

Why does liking something different from you imply there's a war?

There is often a neo-tribalistic mentality.

"My tribe is better than your tribe"

Some people thrive inside this mentality, whole others don't go near it.

Not everyone is thinking like this but a lot of people do. So because of that it's a common heuristic to think of it as "war" because there are some people who do that gladly.

In computing this is almost a tradition (Commodore vs Atari vs PC, Windows vs UNIX vs MacOS). It hasn't exactly hindered progress, I'd rather call it healthy competition ;)

Still though: Amiga 4 ever! :D

It doesn't and I never said anything about preferences directly. There are however culture wars, and they cause problems throughout the industry and discipline.

It seems to hinge a lot on what is “culture”.

"my tribe"

You could just have left off the last part of that :D

> Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress

It feels like Zig is trying to be more like C, and Rust is trying to fill a C++ slot. I wish someone would have made something in between, or that the industry would have adopted D more, it certainly didn't help that their compiler was proprietary for so long, and then they rewrote their STD lib. D to me is one language I love fundamentally, but the ecosystem is nowhere near where it could be.

Meh... I dabbled a bit with D in context of the sokol-d language bindings, and IMHO it's an even bigger kitchen sink than C++.

Kind of tangential to the man Rust v. Zig culture debate but:

> I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).

Kind of reeks of unreasonable expectations to me. I don't think one should expect language designers to redesign a language or introduce new features that would likely be poor fits with the overall existing language philosophy (the design and usage philosophies behind Rust and Zig are practically opposite poles). Language stewards have a responsibility to everyone in their existing user base and they have a responsibility to evolve the language in a ways that's consistent with the expectations they already established (if they want to keep their users that is). Expecting the designers to rework the language to bolt on features from some other language just for your project is kind of absurd. I think Loris's supposed response is actually correct here and probably the best response he could give, without knowing more about precisely what the requests were, how willing you were to contribute work yourself, etc.

I write rust and barely interact with the community. I used to. I spoke at the first rustconf, even. I don't really care to engage with the rust community anymore (I cut myself off entirely from most online communities tbh).

I might stay away from a particularly toxic community or one with wildly different values, but I don't really get why you wouldn't write Rust just because of how some people post about it. Odd tbh. I find the whole thing about "oh the rust zealots" hand wringing stuff so silly, really.

I think you'll find that out of all the pairwise combinations of language communities, there's one that stands out as having beef with a bunch of other ones. And that's not true of e.g. Haskell and OCaml (or to nothing like the same degree), so it's not just about competition for mindshare, it's about an approach to competition for mindshare.

The C++ community and the Zig community seem to get along fine, so it not about looking up at the entrenched thing or down at the new thing, many orders of magnitude there and no drama.

Python, R, and Julia folks all seem to get along.

On the frontend there are a zillion things that compile to JS and even in the big camp the frameworks are split 9 ways, you get a little heat here and there over Vercel throwing big bucks or something but it's rare, generally the Svelte people and the Astro people seem to not mind when the other one front pages or whatever.

Rust is at war with the world. Maybe it can even win but it's a weird road to walk by choice.

>about how bad X is and how I could just do something different in Y

That's just engineering communities in a nutshell...

This is weird to me too, especially to say in the present tense in 2026.

I think I get the point about "Rust culture" (although it's too vague to agree or disagree with, probably on purpose).

But in 2026, Rust is fully a commodity language, and especially to compare it to Zig in this angle is bizarre. Even turning my stereotypes to 11 and thinking back to when I worked with a team developing Rust professionally in 2021, I'd say we got mostly ended up hiring "proglang enthusiasts" and not "Rust people." In terms of "cultural dilution" alone Zig is orders of magnitude more culty than Rust because that many fewer people use it.

This is not surprising and perhaps one of the things I respect about it. Zig is pretty minimalist and I would prefer denying my pet features over becoming design by committee.

I'm a bit curious, what features could you not do without?

> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.

I think you missed his point. He's arguing against homogeneity of (cyber) culture. For example, programming languages that promise to do everything. Rust fanatics indeed can be a bit like that. Every time I see a thread here about someone building something in Zig, they storm in and start arguing 'why not rust!?'.

The fact that you don't like the zig community is healthy and not weird. Don't worry about it. You don't have to like everything and you can disagree on taste.

I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.

Oh, please...if you haven't noticed the carpet bombing of rust advocacy on HN for more than 4 years and still in progress, you're deliberately not paying attention.

> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig

The Zig Evangelism Task Force has supplanted Rust as the premier hypebeast. And they'll be supplanted by the NEXT BIG THING.

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