Comment by josephg
1 day ago
> Programming Rust does not mean I have to: buy into their marketing hype
> give the same smug lectures about "safety"
I'm often confused reading articles like this, which take for granted the existence of some "rust evangelism strike force" which goes after people on the internet for not liking rust enough.
The way people talk, it sounds like there's some insanely effective marketing campaign going on to promote rust everywhere. But I haven't seen it. Certainly not any more than any other technology people get excited about for awhile, like Go. Or docker when that launched.
Where are these comments? Can anyone give some actual links to these sort of comments people say online, which don't get immediately downvoted? The way people talk, these comments must be made in such large volumes that it seems very odd I don't notice them?
It's way rarer on Hacker News than people alleging an omnipresent Rust Evangelism Task Force is constantly imposing itself on people. I have seen "overly enthusiastic" comments about Rust, but I can count them on one hand. I'm not going to link them because I don't want to dogpile ob people. Note that I read many/most of the Rust threads that make it to the front page.
But I have seen thousands of comments complaining about these supposed evangelists (no exaggeration). Less often and less reliably in the past few years, the meme is petering out. But there's absolutely no comparison of the relative frequency. People complain bitterly about Rust on this forum consistently, actual Rust zealots appear very rarely.
It is simultaneously true that Rust is "just a tool" and that this is a significant fact, and that the people complaining about Rust are the bigger problem in the day to day discourse in Rust related threads on this platform and in the present day.
Yeah, I keep hearing about this toxic community from people who won't blink twice to use decade-out-of-date critiques of Java :)
In this very comments section: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193361
"all others languages are flawed, Rust is the only that stands the scrutiny" sounds pretty evangelist to me.
Sure; there's one or two unbalanced, positive comments about rust in this thread. Does that seem out of balance to you, out of 113 comments?
If there was a post about Go, Kotlin or C#, I bet there'd be a few glowing positive comments about the languages. I'd be surprised if there weren't.
Is that a problem? I don't want to move the goal posts, but this really doesn't seem like the problem its made out to be. I count far more comments complaining about rust evangelists than I see actual rust evangelism. Even in a thread about rust being a good tool.
What gives?
I think it's that the few enthusiastic fans make such hyperbolic statements, they create drama and stand out among the majority of reasonable users of the language. They attract attention of the people who are curious about the language, and give the impression that the community is hyping it up too much.
The other day I saw a developer who works on the Rust language saying, please tone it down because it's making us look like fanatics. It's healthy to acknowledge that the language is not perfect, it has room to improve, even some fundamental flaws. Oh, I recognize your user name, recently read a great article you wrote - here it is. This was really informative and interesting.
Rewriting Rust - https://josephg.com/blog/rewriting-rust/
It's not marketing. It's just unproductive and incessant.
For example in this PHP post 3 days ago, ofc someone commented about how they ditched PHP and Go for Rust.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149752
This is a technical forum. People often flex on what they find better / faster / more productive.
I've seen plenty of comments of people giving up on Rust and going for Go or Typescript for their internal company's tooling needs as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
check further down this discussion for immediately downvoted comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191619
Post anything negative about rust, or anything about a severe bug in some non-rust code, for examples of your own
I have nothing against rust, although the learning curve is too steep and development in rust is too slow to be a practical general purpose language for a regular company.
The culture around dependencies also means you pay for your memory safety by increased supply chain risk.
Golang or Java gets you memory safety, faster compilation, easy hiring and have better standard libraries
I completely agree with your criticisms. I've been saying many of the same things about rust for years on HN. But I'm rarely downvoted for saying so.
FWIW, I also really like rust. I personally much prefer it over Go and Java. But those are still very legitimate criticisms.
I think it's an old stereotype. When Rust started gaining popularity, I did see comments like that. Even felt compelled to post them sometimes. But now that we have real production Rust experience, we're a bit more nuanced in our views.
Remember Axum or the reflection drama?
You're probably thinking of Actix and the unsafe/TechEmpower thing? I've never seen Axum involved in any notable drama.
Yeah that one.
2 replies →
IMO it's mostly people who, after being told that only bad programmers need memory management, don't immediately kiss the feet of the speaker.
I started periodically asking the same question and I get 20-25 upvotes and then eat 15 downvotes some hours later. One recent example (if ~75 days is recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291249).
It is a very weird case of aggressors pretending to be victims.
Did I see zealous Rust comments? Sure! 4-5 on HN in the last 5 years maximum. On Reddit it could be 10-15 for the same period but the discourse there is not very civil or informative anyway so I started ignoring them and not thinking them representative.
On HN I see regular Rust hate while claiming that zealots are everywhere... and like you, I just can't see it.
I think it's just what happens when something genuinely great comes along. Some people try it and enthuse about it. Sometimes other people who haven't tried it assume that it's just like all the other average things and therefore the only explanation is irrational fanboyism.
We saw the same thing with the iPhone. It was a step change from previous phones. Loads of people were like "it's just Apple fanbois, I'll stick to my N95" without even trying it.