I don't think it's fair to write a misleading title then tell people "they're reading too much into it".
Implying one thing then walking it back in the article or having the article be about something totally different, then saying people should read the article and not pay attention to the title is just manipulative to your audience.
What appears to be happening as we see in several comments is that some users cannot find any technical reason to use Rust so they rely on a belief that it is somehow magically perfect to justify using it and and the idea that it hasn't perfectly found some creative packing solution, despite the rest of us wondering why one would expect any compiler to – it not really being its job, is felt as an attack on their use of Rust. Someone developing irrational feelings towards an inanimate tool isn't on the article's author.
Like I said in the first place, you can remove the word rust, and nothing changes. That's how you know what's wrong.
It's like a news report saying "black man caught embezzeling". It might be a fact, but it's an irrelevant fact, and it begs the question why it was pointed out. He was probably also a vegetarian, Jewish, a bird watcher, an uncle...
And it's not that there is some weird rule that you have to avoid saying black or rust or whatever. It's simply that if you say something, then the _only_ reasonable way to interpret it is that there was some reason to say it.
You state an equation or give a list of items, it is irrational to assume anything other than that all of the terms or items are relevant.
In this case, rust is just the language being used, which is happenstance. It doesn't matter what language was used. You don't have to go out of your way to hide the language or any silly suggestion like that, but reading the title alone says that there is something about rust and enums. There only 3 items in the title, rust, enum, 64bit word. You can't fault anyone for defaulting to the conclusion that rust, enum, and 64bit word are the essential concepts that will be discussed.
The article isn't bad, and frankly the title isn't even so bad as to be a moral failing or anything. They ARE happening to be working in rust while developing this optimization.
It's simply that it's also entirely correct and reasonable to read the title as saying the words that it says. And the title says something that the content does not.
You wouldn't be able to reasonably use something like "Replacing an Enum with ..." because, especially where enum in Rust means what other languages call sum types, the data representation can be anything. But even the more traditional use of enum isn't defined by any particular data representation. The whole point of an enum is that any value used in implementation is treated as being opaque! Whereas in this case the value is significant.
I mean, you wouldn't be able to no more than you could replace the title with "Hey you, yes you, read this". Which obviously you could do. But it would be a poor title as you wouldn't be able to figure out what the article is about. This title is great because you can predict exactly what the article is about before reading it. I'd even go as far as to say that this is one of the better titles I've seen on HN in a long time.
Granted, it does require technical familiarity to be able to grok it. I can appreciate those who have developed irrational feelings for an inanimate tool aren't coming with a very strong technical background, but who cares about them? The intended audience is clearly technical folk.
Changing the title to "hey you" is a ridiculous meaningless idea that does not relate in any way to "you can remove the word rust and nothing changes". I can only assume you simply don't know how to read, and so there can be no possibility of communication. It was not an obscure indecipherable construction, and your inability to understand it is yours alone.
You fabricate this idea that I have some feeling about rust, and then base a bunch of weird arguments on that invented idea. I neither like nor dislike rust. It's a piece of tech that seems to be functional enough for some tasks. The entire point was that it has no bearing at all, positive or negative. But that is somehow defending a sacred cow?
You're arguing about things no one is saying.
It totally relates. If you remove 'Rust' then you cannot decipher the title. Rust has a known packing scheme when using enums, which is significant when replacing that packing scheme with a creative alternative. 'Enum' alone does not. Again, the whole idea behind an enum construct is to make any implementation values opaque! Any values used in a particular implementation are implementation dependent. As explained before, if you keep the implementation you are talking about a secret then the words become no more useful than "hey you...". The starting point is central to the story about a performance optimization being gained. One must be able to understand what the starting point is in order to extract anything useful from learning about the destination.
> You fabricate this idea that I have some feeling about rust
Whatever do you mean? The bit about feelings was clearly in reference to the earlier comment that spoke to even earlier comments that had nothing to do with you. It's a big world out there. What makes you so sure it revolves around you?