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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been watching this debate online and in my opinion both sides are guilty. Fil is intentionally trying to be funny or at least “interesting “ when he makes his points and I, for one, enjoy his humor, which includes having a go at Rust and other languages. It seems Rust people just can’t take a little criticism, even when it comes from a clearly trolling language! Yes it’s true Rust has an escape hatch, and we’ve seen serious memory safety bugs due to unsafe Rust in the wild. Fil-C does not have one, what you post seems to be internal or even temporary stuff given the author clearly has a goal of not providing one? I would say you and others need to just relax and not treat all and every Rust criticism as an offense to you.

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Maybe I'm just old, but I want to focus on engineering outcomes, not "trolling." If that means "can't take a joke," that's fine, but also "haha I'm just joking" is often what people use to try and hide behind their actual intentions.

I don't even work on Rust anymore, and in fact started this thread with a criticism of Rust. There are lots of good criticisms of Rust. There is a difference between "this criticism isn't good" and "every criticism is an offense."

Yes! I think Fil is great so far but I think as he gets a bigger audience he should, well, consider that and focus on clarity a little more than humor. You can see Andrew’s growth in that respect.

Rust folks, this whole thing is a thread about Zig’s new feature - not even a memory safety-related feature! - and we cannot spend the whole damn time talking about Rust.

Steve, even you - I don’t believe I have ever seen you say an unkind word. But have you considered that it may be unkind to have written more than half of the words on a thread about a Zig performance feature?

I think the derailment of this thread into "is Rust's memory safety good or not" is unfortunate and tedious (this debate must have happened hundreds of times by now on this site alone), but I also think it's unfair to lay the blame on Steve for this. Steve left a thoroughly glowing comment praising Zig's work on compiler performance, and comparing to his perspective on the early days of Rust. He mentioned in passing that he's not a Zig user due to preferring to work in memory-safe languages, which was polite, brief, clearly his personal position, and in my opinion an acceptable way to disclose his relationship with Zig without derailing the thread to be about memory safety.

This comment spawned two subthreads. One of them was focused on the differences between Rust and Zig's compilation model, which is directly relevant to the article and illuminating regarding the engineering tradeoffs.

In the other subthread, pron posted paragraphs and paragraphs arguing about what memory safety really means and whether or not Steve is right to have his opinion that Rust is "safe". This tangent had essentially nothing to do with the content of Steve's comment; it (and not Steve's initial comment) was the point where the thread was derailed from the topic of Zig's incremental compilation model. Steve responded politely in this thread to comments and questions directed at him, but did not fan the flames or take the thread further into off-topicness. If the moderators collapsed pron's comment or detached it and pinned it to the bottom of the page, this comment thread would be much better and much more respectful to the Zig project.

I think the RESF trope is just about dead now; it's given way to the Rust Detractor Strike Force showing up to turn unrelated threads into tangential arguments about why Rust is bad.

> But have you considered that it may be unkind to have written more than half of the words on a thread about a Zig performance feature?

Inherently? No! I commented specifically because I was really glad to see this post. This work that Zig is doing is very good, and I wanted to call that out, in part specifically because I am on "the other side" in whatever sense that is. Why would it be unkind for kind words to be coming from me?

I do see that you often have kind words for Zig and some attempt to more precisely define the differences.

What I mean is a bit different though, it’s that these arguments you get drawn into end up drowning out any real discussion of Zig’s progress. I don’t think that’s your intent but it is frustrating. I should be clear, I don’t think it’s wrong for you to defend yourself from accusations etc., I just wish it didn’t look like this.

I wonder how much better HN would be if they took a page from other forum systems that said “you know what, this whole branch of stuff should be moved over here and renamed so the original topic can move on”.

Sorry, all this may be unhelpful, I don’t know where the line should be, I’m just thinking out loud about the problem.

Ah, I see what you're saying. Oh, trust me, it's very frustrating for me as well. It is especially frustrating in these specific circumstances because I know that Ron and I will not come to an agreement, so...

>Steve, even you - I don’t believe I have ever seen you say an unkind word. But have you considered that it may be unkind to have written more than half of the words on a thread about a Zig performance feature?

You're accusing steve of what pron is doing... I mean look at how much text pron wrote, it is much more than steve wrote, and how pron is constantly skirting the edges of the HN guidelines.

My reasoning, which you may not agree with, is that I think that I have seen pron say unkind words before and I thought I had a better chance of persuading Steve to let it go. (Sorry pron, that’s how I was thinking of it. No, I have no specific examples.)

The fact is that every thread about Zig is filled with this kind of battle, and I’m tired of it, and it doesn’t represent any community, it’s so much worse on HN than anywhere else, and it’s all just defensiveness and crap.

I should let things go more often, it's a personal problem :) Thanks for the nudge, I'll consider it in the future.

Let the healing begin!

> It seems Rust people just can’t take a little criticism, even when it comes from a clearly trolling language

I think this is a case of people who can dish it out but can't take it. As far as I'm concerned if you troll someone you should expect to get trolled back.

Might get downvoted but was thinking this exact thing when reading this debate. Rustations have this very bad habit (IMO) of pushing the "my language is better than yours" to an extreme that I haven't seen elsewhere (but I don't frequent a huge number of language circles so...). Yet when it is done to them they get all upset about it.

> Rustations have this very bad habit (IMO) of pushing the "my language is better than yours" to an extreme

It’s funny, I’ve heard people claim this about rust developers for years. But I’ve seen very little evidence of it. Where are all these toxic comments? Look at Klabnik’s comments in this thread. He’s lovely.

—-

A son comes home to his poverty stricken family with a spring in his step. “Mum! Dad! All that time at community college paid off! I got a job!”. Dad immediately snaps - “so what, now you have a job, you think you’re better than us?”

What happened? Dad is unconsciously projecting a belief onto his son. Something like “unemployed people are shameful”. Then dad feels judged by the projected belief and he attacks the son for it. But it wasn’t the son’s belief in the first place. He just wanted his parents to be proud.

How does the son respond? It’s a tricky one. If the son defends himself by talking up how great it is to have a job, he reinforces the projection and dad will get more angry. If he says “there’s nothing to be proud of for having a job” then he’s lying about his values. It’s a trap.

When I’m feeling uncharitable, I project this same dynamic onto rust and C/C++ devs. “Mom! Dad! I figured out a way to get memory safety without sacrificing native execution and performance!” C: “So you think your language is better than ours? Why are you so toxic about it?”

I’m not really sure how to respond to comments like yours. I think you’re mad at ghosts.

This thread is evidence of it.

The OP is about Zig and now there are 40+ mentions of Fil-C initiated mostly by Rust folks and those comments are largely criticizing me personally.

That’s toxic AF!

Exactly what is your definition of "initiated mostly by" and why do you promote it as objective? It sure seems to me that Rust detractors see the word "Rust" and immediately spawn a flame war. You, of course, also seem awfully happy every time it happens.

It's funny because my comment was intended the other way, i.e. the Zig community & core team is antagonistic towards Rust so they shouldn't be surprised when they get pushback, like in this thread. But it really does go both ways when you look at how the Rust community has acted historically.

But hey, nerd holy wars have existed since the internet began. I use vim btw...oh you use emacs? You're an idiot. Etc etc.

I'm not sure this is even about Zig or Rust. I'm honestly getting the feeling that the actual problem is that pron is turning into a troll and it's because he has a history of working on the JVM and he sees everything from the lens of writing language runtimes that ignore the Rust memory model altogether and the troll part is that he is not saying out loud what his niche is.

When he brought up the universality claim, he came up with a niche counter example that he kept inside his head and he makes it out to be the general rule by being extremely vague about literally everything.

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