Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

thenewwazoo.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 71 posts

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

#61

Post by peterth3 »

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…

> people absorbing a technology as an element of personal identity

This is true for all modestly popular technologies today. It’s fueled by social media culture. We are living in a world where people get wrapped up in their individual identity because it’s the only way to get any attention. This is a simply how social capital is distributed on the internet.

If you want your programming language, new tech, new video game, or new thing to be popular, then you need to create hype with influencers that wrap their identity up in your new thing and preach it’s endless benefits with cult-like fervor.

In fact, it’s impossible for a new language to survive unless they play this game. In other words, the hype we all hate isn’t rust’s fault, it’s our fault.

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

#62

Post by ncmncm »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #57
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 We especially don't need to know your (embarrassingly outdated) opinions about othe…

> There is no harm in mentioning implementation languages in the bit at the end where you invite people to send patches Okay, but... there's no harm in mentioning implementation languages in the title either? If you don't care, that's fine, you can just ignore it. To me, "built with [new technology]" is a sign that the person who made it had fun, and is proud of their work. It's like an engineer posting "look at our…

That is exactly the point: pride in having succeeded at doing X using Y is not informative. It is an indulgence. "I graduated from Harvard" may be interesting to your Mom and, maybe, strangers still at Harvard, but not to us, and would be unwelcome on the HN dashboard.

If you published a thesis, that thesis topic could be interesting, but not that Harvard accepted it, unless they shouldn't have.

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

#63

Post by therockhead »

ksec wrote: post #45

>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 m…

> I do. But no one hyped Java as the Silver Bullet or the Holy Grail.

Well Sun did actually, apparently Applets were going to change everything.

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

#65

Post by erik_seaberg »

kobebrookskC3 wrote: post #44
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.

This. I don’t really care about replacing Java or Python or Go with Rust (any perf difference might not be worth the extra effort), but evidence has been mounting for my entire career that we must leave C and C++ behind if we’re ever going to arrive at a platform that works reliably.

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

#66

Post by kobebrookskC3 »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #65
kobebrookskC3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This. I don’t really care about replacing Java or Python or Go with Rust (any perf difference might not be worth the extra effort), but evidence has been mounting for my entire career that we must leave C and C++ behind if we’re ever going to arrive at a platform that works reliably.

the worst part is that testing might give something that is reliable against non-malicious inputs, and then explode given malicious ones. actually, that's not the worst part. the worst part is when nothing seems to occur on a malicious input, but actually rce is occurring https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i....

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

#67

Post by bb010g »

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…

You better go tell https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris to pack it up because they can't realistically continue to write their kernel in Rust and that Rust is for web developers now.

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

#68

Post by zozbot234 »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #58
rich_sasha wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you’re kind enough to express a moderate opinion: do you have a comparison against C++? The C++ “niche” seems to be no-performance-compromise, low-level-when-needed, high-level-sort-of, native compilation, seamless interop with C, and thus everything else. It is also very verbose, easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and requires a fair amount of proficiency to just use on a daily basis. Can Rust be the replacem…

Not the parent, but I think in a vacuum Rust would be pretty good at filling C++'s niche (minimal performance compromise, low-level-when-needed, high-level-sort-of, native compilation, though C interop is less seamless), plus it's more expressive/beautiful (but more troublesome if you want to mutate aliased pointers), and teaches you upfront to avoid pitfalls. But Rust has less thorough library support (though Rust d…

> and the existing practices around separate compilation and stable ABI can't be carried to Rust

They totally can, by using the C ABI. C++ ABI is not really "stable" anyway, it's been long due for a break.

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

#70

Post by phendrenad2 »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #10
dizon wrote: post #3

The problem occurs when I arrive on a landing page for a project re-invented in Rust that advertises not encountering double frees as a feature of the project. I notice the project is nothing more than a build tool for web development, and I just shake my head.

Personally I tend to use C and C++ tools more often, and in that universe, being statically free of memory errors is an innovation. In the webdev world, I suppose native speed and not having a large runtime or GC is Rust's primary innovation (though for batch jobs like build tools, a small Go-like runtime/GC isn't actually a negative compared to Rust, and I've never noticed GC pauses when I previously use the Micro e…

I'm sure any build tool for web dev can leak memory like crazy and it's fine, the OS will clean it up when the build tool exits. So Rust's features are wasted on that use case.
Post reply on HN