Comment by maxime_cb
5 hours ago
OP here: I think you're reading too much into the title. It's not about the failure of Rust. It's about where I stepped in with some custom optimizations for better performance. If you read the blog post, the solution implemented is very Rust-y as well. It uses a newtype with custom methods to try and make the code as nice and readable as possible.
FWIW this post was very well received on the Rust subreddit. They loved it and it got over 350 upvotes, so that community definitely didn't receive it as some sort of attack on Rust.
I think you're reading too much into the title.
I don't think it's fair to write a misleading title then tell people "they're reading too much into it".
Implying one thing then walking it back in the article or having the article be about something totally different, then saying people should read the article and not pay attention to the title is just manipulative to your audience.
The problem is that there isn't anything misleading about the title. It is well understood that creative packing of data can provide optimizations under certain circumstances. Nobody should have reason to think otherwise. The title quite accurately captures what the rest of the article is about as well as any title possible can.
What appears to be happening as we see in several comments is that some users cannot find any technical reason to use Rust so they rely on a belief that it is somehow magically perfect to justify using it and and the idea that it hasn't perfectly found some creative packing solution, despite the rest of us wondering why one would expect any compiler to – it not really being its job, is felt as an attack on their use of Rust. Someone developing irrational feelings towards an inanimate tool isn't on the article's author.