Yes absolutely. The politics is stupid crap. If everyone in the rust org quit the community would continue onwards just fine.
Rust is a great language with a lot of advantages and is absolutely worth considering for your next project.
Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
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Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#12Rust is technically excellent, and has significant buy-in from major corporations, who won't allowwz their investments to go to waste. I wouldn't worry about the drama.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#13Technically, the language is excellent. Organizationally, major corporations have invested a lot of resources into it, they won't allow it to fail. Community-wise, there are lots of friendly and supportive people in the quieter corners (this is true most everywhere, I think).
That being said, my recommendation for learning systems programming would be to consider trying plain old C first. Rust's safety features are a godsend, but IMO easier to understand once you have experienced working without them. (Similarly, I like to recommend leaning a dynamically typed language first, and introducing static typing later.)
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#14Every community has its fair share of drama. I wouldn't worry too much about such things.
This kind of thing has happened forever, it's just thst before social media it was confined to obscure listservs and usenet channels and most of the people using the language would never see it.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#15If you have no experience with low level programming I think it is better to learn c first anyway. It will help you understand some of the problems that Rust's design solves.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#16I agree with what other posters say here regarding building, specifically, C knowledge first.
Further, I've noticed a trend highlighted by people such as Jonathan Blow that there are users of Rust who don't fully understand object lifetimes in particular systems and are hacking around warnings in Rust creating unsafe memory scenarios while being told otherwise because all of their compiler messages have disappeared.
Some things in software engineering are hard, but you can't escape them. It seems like you can only defer the problem until you actually need to understand what's going on, and by the time you realize that, you'll be deep in experience with "weird holes" in your knowledge (as I fondly remember a (pre-?)algebra teacher telling me when I was discussing quaternions in middle school.)
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
solely I agree with that, but that stuff you mention is still a factor. Politics is creeping into everything, and there are lots of reasons why choosing a relatively politically stable language is important, though obviously not the only factor. I think the best one could hope for is a lot of diverse groups with different political views and motivations being invested in the future of a language, so that despite any…
Microsoft and Alphabet have plenty of motivation to keep things on track, as does the Linux Foundation and others. I suspect that, if things get completely out of hand, that corporate sponsors might impress their will upon the Rust Foundation to address any issues around governance. Politics will creep into anything, if one allows that to happen.
Google and Microsoft are political entities with their own political agendas that sometimes aren't aligned with profit making. Many of the activists in CoC dominated communities don't care the slightest bit about profit or even continued existence of their entity if it means they can enforce their brand of ideological purity. FAANG entities threatening to reduce or eliminate resource allocation to a project will for some be evidence of the capitalistic desire to control everything and will motivate the community to welcome the purge of the unclean from their community.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#18Every community has its fair share of drama. I wouldn't worry too much about such things.
Every town has crime but some towns have far more crime than others.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#19I program a lot of personal projects and just ignore the drama. It's a fun language to program in, and whatever dramatics the core team is engaged in, they've still managed to put out an excellent language and ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: Is Rust worth investing in as a reliable C-alt given its recent saga?
#20Just a recommendation, but learn Rust first. Once you have a good intuition about mutability xor aliasing (which is what the borrow checker enforces), you'll actually write better C and C++ code should you need to.
Personally, I think Rust is the future of systems programming and there's no more reason to learn C / C++ than there is a reason to learn FORTRAN or COBOL (specifically, the reason is only ever "I need to get a job using those languages"). But, you know, feel free to take that with a grain of salt and see for yourself.
Rust isn't going anywhere any time soon given how many big companies use it, so even if you learn C/C++ first, you'll likely need to learn rust as well eventually if you want to do systems stuff.