Comment by Brian_K_White
2 hours ago
What's misleading about the title is that the title implies something about rust, while the content does not.
Like I said in the first place, you can remove the word rust, and nothing changes. That's how you know what's wrong.
It's like a news report saying "black man caught embezzeling". It might be a fact, but it's an irrelevant fact, and it begs the question why it was pointed out. He was probably also a vegetarian, Jewish, a bird watcher, an uncle...
And it's not that there is some weird rule that you have to avoid saying black or rust or whatever. It's simply that if you say something, then the _only_ reasonable way to interpret it is that there was some reason to say it.
You state an equation or give a list of items, it is irrational to assume anything other than that all of the terms or items are relevant.
In this case, rust is just the language being used, which is happenstance. It doesn't matter what language was used. You don't have to go out of your way to hide the language or any silly suggestion like that, but reading the title alone says that there is something about rust and enums. There only 3 items in the title, rust, enum, 64bit word. You can't fault anyone for defaulting to the conclusion that rust, enum, and 64bit word are the essential concepts that will be discussed.
The article isn't bad, and frankly the title isn't even so bad as to be a moral failing or anything. They ARE happening to be working in rust while developing this optimization.
It's simply that it's also entirely correct and reasonable to read the title as saying the words that it says. And the title says something that the content does not.
Right, Rust tells us something important: How the data was packed pre-optimization. This is useful information as, at least those with some familiarity with Rust, will have an understanding of what is being replaced.
You wouldn't be able to reasonably use something like "Replacing an Enum with ..." because, especially where enum in Rust means what other languages call sum types, the data representation can be anything. But even the more traditional use of enum isn't defined by any particular data representation. The whole point of an enum is that any value used in implementation is treated as being opaque! Whereas in this case the value is significant.
I mean, you wouldn't be able to no more than you could replace the title with "Hey you, yes you, read this". Which obviously you could do. But it would be a poor title as you wouldn't be able to figure out what the article is about. This title is great because you can predict exactly what the article is about before reading it. I'd even go as far as to say that this is one of the better titles I've seen on HN in a long time.
Granted, it does require technical familiarity to be able to grok it. I can appreciate those who have developed irrational feelings for an inanimate tool aren't coming with a very strong technical background, but who cares about them? The intended audience is clearly technical folk.
For whatever it's worth, I read zero negativity about Rust in the title or content.