Comment by Affric

> I'm starting to wonder if the Rust toxicity and evangelism are more meme than reality.

Doubtful. If you're running a somewhat known FOSS C or C++ project, chances are you've had to close issues from Rust fanatics aggressively urging you for a rewrite, and shaming you if you object. Nothing has changed in that regard.

"Managing any kind of object graph in general" is just a hard problem. It's what tracing GC was actually invented for! (And indeed, that is still the only one-size-fits-all solution.) It's not fair to blame Rust for surfacing the issues instead of just sweeping them under the rug and letting them blow up in production.

IME in the last while on HN the Rust Evangelism(TM) debate has been brought up either unprompted or because someone argued that Rust was objectively better on some metric (like memory safety compared to another language). In the latter case someone says something that can be argued on its merits but then someone else decides to tone police about “evangelism”.

In this thread there are two Rust subthreads: someone brought up (and was downvoted) “why not Rust” out of nowhere (evangelism) and this one where we are discussing Rust Evangelism because GP quoted Kling on some separate tweet.

So yes. We mostly seem to discuss Rust Evangelism as a meta thing. Something that has supposedly definitely happened, or is happening somewhere else, just rarely right in front of us in the discussions at hand.[1] I think that qualifies as a meme.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41119392

> Rust Evangelism Strike Force

I realize this is not what people generally are referring to when they complain about the Rust community, but this is the part that annoys me.

Feels like every damn day I see people preaching the Good News of Rust, pointing to things as being the unique and sole property of their preferred language. Except those things have been around for ages, in other languages.

Memory safety? Invented by Rust! Algebraic Data Types? Invented by Rust! Funadamental FP constructs? Invented by Rust! High performance? Invented by Rust!

If instead they just said that they enjoy having all of these things in a single language, well great. But instead it has to turn into a preach fest.

That quote is describing the program's lifetime (how long a process runs), not the project's.

What about the Rust community is not welcoming? Ruby has had its fair share of community controversies, so that's an odd choice for comparison.

For years, whenever there was drama and shit-flinging in the OSS world, i looked up the people causing that on github and blocked them. Github has this feature that it warns you when you look at a repository where people you blocked contributed.

If you keep such a list, you'll easily recognize projects you better stay away from. For me, this was one of the reasons to keep away from Rust.

> Compared to other langs I've used, rust gives me more confidence in maintaining and refactoring complex projects

In my humble experience, Rust gives me great confidence that my refactoring will likely be correct, but the type system makes refactoring anything moderately complex very difficult. I tend to paint myself into corners, and the compiler, in it's religious oath of correctness, won't allow a mortal like me to get away with it.

I guess you can dismiss that as a skill issue, but Rust feels like a language that is very tough to iterate with. It's probably something I will reach for when I'm sure of what exactly my program will do, and how it will do it.

It's definitely more clunky for complex object graphs. Making a useful directed graph with cycles is pretty annoying. Not impossible my any means (I'm currently working on a Rust project for audio graphs that allows cycles), but not nearly as easy as a GC language would make it.

There was a big fight on Twitter last month because of a comment he made 3 years ago (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814). I think that's closely related.

Ladybird and Serenity have a policy of not allowing any sort of expression of or reference to someone's sexuality or gender identity, as this is deemed "divisive" or "politicising". Rust does... not have that.

Basically the one that gave origin to Rust Evangelism Strike Force meme.

It doesn't matter if only a portion is toxic, because that portion can easily poison the well all on their own for everybody.

It was probably a condition of getting funding.

In the NGO world using or funding greenfield C/C++ is a great way to make yourself a social pariah I bet.

A corporation wouldn't care, because they're driven by what makes dollars and cents.

But in non-profits (which Ladybird chose to be part of) it's all about ideology.

The only way to get an exemption is if you're doing AI which he isn't.

C++ is a loaded gun, strapped to your body and aimed at your foot, with infinite bullets automatically firing every second, that requires you to constantly exert 25 lbs of force to tilt the gun and avoid hitting your foot.

Most of the time, you’ll be successful. However, nobody seeing your plight would be shocked if your foot eventually gets blown up. To claim this state of affairs is just fine because you’ve done it for years, pitiable.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is true that the community is toxic, but I myself haven't really seen it

can you please substantiate in which points and how right he is? do you have experience with complex object graphs in Rust, direct or indirect experience about the community? thanks!