Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#41

Post by rramadass » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:04 AM UTC

CousinMicks wrote: post #34

ferdowsi wrote: post #28

Rust evangelism is one of the cleaner examples of people absorbing a technology as an element of personal identity . You have all the hallmarks: - rhetoric taking on levels of hostile zealotry like the linked post - aggressive insertion of the topic in conversations where it is inappropriate - inability or resistance to recognizing faults For another modern example of technology as crusade, see "the blockchain". It's…

Honestly, the community is the most off-putting part of the language. The hype makes it difficult to find quality content; all I find are strange comparisons to dissimilar languages and "I rewrote 'Thing' in Rust" posts.

You took the words right out of my mouth.

We are being asked to believe that the mere fact that "I rewrote 'Thing' in Rust" is somehow superior to everything else.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#42

Post by ncmncm » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

Lazare wrote: post #14

defaultname wrote: post #6

I'm pretty in the dark about [new thing]. I don't have skills in it and really don't grok it. And even though it seldom gets mentioned, my insecurity about that gap in my knowledge -- that thing that makes my existing knowledge a little bit obsolete -- makes me laser focused on those instances where it does appear (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon of sorts): If one in a hundred posts mentions [new thing], I'll throw my hand…

Quite right. On the other hand, plenty of other dumb technologies have launched, been mocked, and sunk without a trace (or worse) because they were just bad . As Carl Sagan apparently said "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." And even when the technology itself has merit, it's absolutely true that some of the people who have…

The overwhelming majority of things have been launched and soon sank with little trace just because they were not enough better than the competition. (I count Modula, D and C# among those, from different arenas.)

It is still far from clear whether Rust will achieve the miracle of becoming mainstream. That puts it far ahead of most languages, where it is obvious from the outset that they will fizzle.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#43

Post by shmerl » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

dizon wrote: post #38

Rust could have been a great systems programming language. Unfortunately, it has been taken over by web developers. All systems programming jobs are still in C/C++. It could have been different if Mozilla hadn't rewritten all of Firefox in Rust while complaining about C++. Firefox dropped from 10% of the web to 3% and into irrelevance during that Rust rewrite and gained nothing. Ironically, Chrome is written in C++ a…

I guess Web developers are planning to take over Linux kernel now by using Rust for it?

Firefox market share has nothing to do with usage of Rust. I very much welcome Mozilla using it in Firefox. They should have gone even further and started using Servo proper. But they didn't have enough resources for that.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#44

Post by kobebrookskC3 » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:16 AM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #11

Stop treating written in rust as a feature.

it's more like being written in a memory-unsafe language is an anti-feature.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#45

Post by ksec » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

>Do you remember when Java was the hot new thing? No, probably not. You’re probably too young.

I do. But no one hyped Java as the Silver Bullet or the Holy Grail. There were many known trade offs. ( Performance, GC, Memory usage etc ) And we were allowed to discuss those trade offs.

I never read anyone actually disapprove Rust for its absolute ability to provide memory safety. Nor any inherent distaste for Rust. It may be a difficult language to grasp, but that is about it in terms of negativity.

But when Rust Evangelism StrikeForce demands every single piece of new software to be written in Rust otherwise they are deemed unsafe. One have to question whether any additional Rust hype ( at the time when RESF were still active ) is simply adding fuel to fire, without also adding some balanced view on draw backs.

Technology evangelist, despite my hatred against the term as it should simply be "marketing", is somewhat a necessary evil in order to gain traction and critical mass. But the key word here is critical mass, not world domination, unless you are a marketing and PR genius like Steve Jobs.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#46

Post by kobebrookskC3 » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #18

Maybe someday I’ll write an Earley parser in rust to figure it out (and I like writing Earley parsers and not actually using them). What gets my goat is people saying it is a crime against humanity to write code in C++ instead of rust because reasons.

let's check out https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i..., which has probably been used to enable "crimes against humanity". integer overflow results in undersized allocation which is indexed out of bounds. if c++ had either overflow checks or bounds checking as the default, how likely is this bug to happen?

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#47

Post by jcranmer » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

dizon wrote: post #38

Rust could have been a great systems programming language. Unfortunately, it has been taken over by web developers. All systems programming jobs are still in C/C++. It could have been different if Mozilla hadn't rewritten all of Firefox in Rust while complaining about C++. Firefox dropped from 10% of the web to 3% and into irrelevance during that Rust rewrite and gained nothing. Ironically, Chrome is written in C++ a…

Mozilla didn't rewrite all of Firefox in Rust--they didn't even rewrite most of it. The decline in Firefox share came well before anyone seriously contemplated moving pieces of Firefox into Rust, and all you can say is that what was rewritten didn't do much to arrest that decline.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#48

Post by kobebrookskC3 » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:28 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #30

Stop whining about whining about Rust hype. We don't need to know that your new shell / grep / text editor is coded in Rust. If it's good, it's good for other reasons, and those reasons are certain to be overwhelmingly more interesting. If it's bad, it's just bad, and that won't save it. We especially don't need to know in the title . We especially don't need to know your (embarrassingly outdated) opinions about othe…

if there was a production-grade memory-safe language with similar performance, i would also advocate for it. it's less that rust is good, and that memory unsafety is bad.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#49

Post by mdoms » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #42

Lazare wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite right. On the other hand, plenty of other dumb technologies have launched, been mocked, and sunk without a trace (or worse) because they were just bad . As Carl Sagan apparently said "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." And even when the technology itself has merit, it's absolutely true that some of the people who have…

The overwhelming majority of things have been launched and soon sank with little trace just because they were not enough better than the competition. (I count Modula, D and C# among those, from different arenas.) It is still far from clear whether Rust will achieve the miracle of becoming mainstream. That puts it far ahead of most languages, where it is obvious from the outset that they will fizzle.

C#, a 21 year old programming language which consistently makes it into the top 6 programming languages by popularity in all methodologies of measuring, "launched and soon sank with little trace"? That's an interesting take.

Re: Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

#50

Post by ncmncm » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 5:29 AM UTC

mdoms wrote: post #49

ncmncm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of things have been launched and soon sank with little trace just because they were not enough better than the competition. (I count Modula, D and C# among those, from different arenas.) It is still far from clear whether Rust will achieve the miracle of becoming mainstream. That puts it far ahead of most languages, where it is obvious from the outset that they will fizzle.

C#, a 21 year old programming language which consistently makes it into the top 6 programming languages by popularity in all methodologies of measuring, "launched and soon sank with little trace"? That's an interesting take.

Hope springs eternal.

We can be pretty confident, anyway, that it won't outlive Microsoft.