Comment by rs186
9 hours ago
If your attitude is just "I'm not going to use abc because too many people say it's good", without even just trying that out first hand to verify those claims, I don't think you can go very far in your technical skills.
The best engineers I know are open to everything and played with almost every tool/language/whatever to form (sorry) informed opinions about them. They often know what they are talking about, and they choose the best tool for the job.
I think I can articulate what the comment means in a way that may make you rethink what you've said a little bit. I'm not wanting to make you think Rust is bad (I personally think it is good) I'm just trying to show you why this person may not be as backwards as you think they are.
So the person in question is irritated at an interesting blog post about a 20+ year old game being used as another opportunity to push Rust. So for starters Rust obviously wasn't around at the time the game was developed so it's not like Rockstar made the wrong call in implementing this using C++. But more importantly I don't think Rust is currently in a state where studios can justify using it to develop AAA games. They'd need big teams of developers with Rust experience who are well-versed in the sort of problems encountered during game development. You'd need battle-tested build/deployment processes that allow you to produce the binaries for Playstation/Xbox (not too dissimilar CPU/GPU wise, but each with their own platform-level quirks no doubt) and Switch hardware - potentially across multiple generations. You'd need various platforms' OS hooks and network-service APIs available. Additionally you'd need to convince the guys with the money that instead of spending $projected on a game, you'd need to spend $projected+$mystery_number when they take the plunge and write their first game in Rust with new tools etc rather than C++ and everything they currently use. The gaming industry is nothing if not ruthless at making money, if it made financial sense they'd be moving to Rust already - if it will make sense in the future, they'll be planning to do it.
You've been charitable in your read of the original comment, taking it as "this family of problem does not exist in Rust" - and for what it's worth I agree and really value this. However this other commenter has presumably seen it as a bit more naive and missing the bigger picture, and in combination with other similar experiences is questioning the value of these of glowing testimonies.
In addition, a lot of people saying "this is great, this is the future!" doesn't necessarily make something good automatically. For about 5+ years here on HN we had legions of people responding "blockchains will fix this" to almost every problem and very confidently declaring the rest of us are luddites for not getting it. I'm obviously not saying Rust is the same, I'm just trying to show that not following the crowd doesn't automatically mean you're the kind who will always fall behind.
As for how to avoid this? I dunno if you can undo the zillions of RIIR comments that have been floating around since Rust appeared on the scene, but if I was evangelising or even just strongly recommending it I'd just keep in mind that my target audience is maybe sick of seeing the same kinds of comments and would be a bit more creative and/or sensitive in approaching the topic.