Comment by znpy
10 months ago
> I have to say that I used to be excited about Rust, but the Rust community seems very toxic to me. I see a lot of anger, aggression, vindictiveness, public drama, etc.
I had the same impression.
Why all this drama is 90% of the time around Rust people?
Because many of them are still relatively young. There is nothing wrong with youth, but it can contribute to over-zealousness.
Also, for many of them, Rust is the first systems language they've ever touched. And that fact alone excites them. Because now they can "dream big" too.
But they have bought into the whole C/C++ are by default insecure and therefore garbage. In their mind, no mortal could ever write so much as a single safe function in those languages. So their points of view are always going to be based on that premise.
What they fail to recognize is that an operating system kernel, by virtue of the tasks it has to perform- things like mapping and unmapping memory, reading/writing hardware registers, interacting with peripherals, initiating dma transfers, context switching, etc.- have effects on the underlying hardware and the runtime environment; effects that neither the type system nor the temporal memory safety of Rust can model, because it happens at a level lower than the language itself. Rust's safety guarantees are helpful, but they are not infallible at that level. The kernel literally changes the machine out from under you.
They further fail to appreciate the significant impedance mismatch between C and Rust. When one language has concepts that are in fact constraints that another language simply does not have, there is going to be friction around the edges. Friction means more work. For everyone. From planning to coding to testing to rollout.
So you have well-intentioned, excited, but still self-righteous developers operating from what they perceive to be a position of superiority, who silently look down upon the C developers, and behave in a manner that (to outsiders at least) demonstrates that they really do believe they're better, even if they don't come right out and say it.
Just read the comments in any thread involving Rust. It is inconceivable to them that anybody would be so stupid or naive as to question the utility of the Rust language. To them, the language is unassailable.
The petty drama and social media brigading on top of it, along with the propensity to quit when the going gets tough, it's pretty easy to see why some people feel the way they do about the whole thing.
A programming language is not a religion. It is not a way of life. It is a tool. It's not like it's a text editor or something.
> A programming language is not a religion. It is not a way of life. It is a tool. It's not like it's a text editor or something.
I really hope that last sentence was a joke.
It was :)
> But they have bought into the whole C/C++ are by default insecure and therefore garbage. In their mind, no mortal could ever write so much as a single safe function in those languages.
No one thinks this except some strawman that you've devised. No point in reading anything else in this comment when this is so blatantly absurd and detached from reality.
I'm sorry sir/mam, but that is simply not true.
All you have to do is read comments from members of the Rust community online, in every public forum where Rust is discussed in any way.
Understand, I am not trying to villainize an entire community of software developers; but for you to say something that's blatantly false is to just stick your head in the sand.
You should try and read the words people write. Opinions are not formed in a vacuum.
Edit: to be clear- I have no problems with Rust the language beyond some ergonomic concerns. I am not a Rust hater, nor am I a zealot. I do advocate for C# a lot for application code though. But I do not deride others' language preferences. You should not dismiss my observations because I used hyperbole. Obviously not every Rust dev thinks you can't write a secure C/C++ function; don't pick out the one hyperbolic statement to discredit my entire post. Bad form.
The kernel is not exactly known for being drama-free, and this drama didn't start with "Rust people", it started with Christoph.
Was Hellwig first, or Andre Hedrick, or maybe Hans Reiser?
Because that’s all your brain are capable of recalling, the ones with Rust-tagging.
With just a google search away you can dismiss your claim of 90% but you don’t want to do it because you only believe what you want to believe.