Comment by ActorNightly
6 months ago
Rust makes sense in the case of Android, where the kernel and software is rolled by Google. In the same way that Java made sense for a lot of the backend services in 2010s despite its drawbacks before Node and Python got major improvements in speed and compute became cheaper.
That however is a very niche case where Rust is applicable. The anti-rust people (like me) aren't saying that Rust is bad. We are just arguing against its adoption for everything.
When you see shit like "[...] should be rewritten in Rust because memory safe", it shows that people have no idea what memory safety even is. There is this dumb belief stemming from lack of proper CS education that any code you write can just randomly have memory safety issues.
The downsides of Rust is that its ownership semantics are often cumbersome to write, which slows down development. Rust is also still evolving because of the stuff that happens under the hood. And for a lot of things, where network latency is dominant and cpu cycles are spent sleeping waiting for responses to come back, you don't need natively compiled code in lieu of python or node that are way more flexible and faster to develop in.
So in most cases, Rust is not applicable, when you can write perfectly memory safe code faster.
This is effectively true in C and C++ though. Show me a nontrivial project in either of those languages that has never had a memory safety issue and I'll show you a project that doesn't look at quality. Even SQlite doesn't meet this bar, despite incredibly skilled programmers and an obsessive commitment to quality.
>Show me a nontrivial project in either of those languages that has never had a memory safety issue
I mean, the linux kernel is a pretty good example. Static analyzers and things like valgrind exist for a reason.
There's been over a thousand memory safety CVEs in the kernel this year alone [0], the most recent published 2 days ago. Most of these aren't exploitable and are caught before stable, so I went to LWN instead and "scrolled down" until I saw an article that mentioned a memory safety vuln in stable kernels. "Scrolled down" is in quotes because there was no scrolling involved. Today's Friday security updates post links USN-7861-3 [1], which includes fixes for memory safety issues like CVE-2025-37838 [2].
[0] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/p...
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1046495/
[2] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-37838
> There is this dumb belief stemming from lack of proper CS education that any code you write can just randomly have memory safety issues.
I sense a lack of statistical education here.
If you say that something can happen, then whether to use a tool to mitigiate it should also be qualified. The conversation around Rust is that bugs WILL happen, which is not true.
we'll have to agree to disagree.
> There is this dumb belief stemming from lack of proper CS education that any code you write can just randomly have memory safety issues.
lol. this take is hilarious in the face of the article you are commenting on. holy cognitive dissonance.
> The downsides of Rust is that its ownership semantics are often cumbersome to write
skill issue
>skill issue
Lol, this is actually very ironic considering Rust is handholding you because you don't have the skills to write memory safe code.
Like I said in my other posts, Rust makes sense in very niche situations. The article just proves that it works for the niche case where its applicable. That doesn't mean Rust automatically wins.
Readers, feast your eyes on direct evidence of how facts don’t change people’s minds. You can almost see him putting fingers in his ears and going lalala