[platinumrad]

Comments like this hurt the adoption of Rust by making the community seem hopelessly naive. It's just how people make the Go community look bad by acting like Go invented CSP.

Rust is a (very?) good language that I hope will see more adoption but it is not the first memory safe language. Garbage collected languages are perfectly appropriate in many situations. Ada is almost 40 years old.

[steveklabnik]

Why is wondering “could another tool have solved this problem” come across as “hopelessly naïve?”

It didn’t say Rust was the first. It also acknowledged that there’s great reasons it’s currently not used here.

[platinumrad]

Memes about programming languages (and programming language communities) die hard so it's probably a good idea to avoid reinforcing them when possible. I read this comment as a sort of implicit variant of "RIIR". Judging by the downvotes, I think others did the same.

Rust probably doesn't even deserve the "RIIR" meme as 1) "RIIR" seems to happen way more often on HN/similar than on mailing lists or bug trackers and 2) much of the time the person saying "RIIR" admits to not even being a Rust programmer themselves. I think it's just a side effect of Rust (justifiably) emphasizing safety, and by extension security, in its presentation, and the tendency of some people to conflate the elimination of a certain class of vulnerabilities with the elimination of all vulnerabilities. To be fair, this poster didn't make this mistake.

Edit: Another mistake that some people make after being introduced to Rust is assume that languages that don't explicitly emphasize memory safety in their presentation aren't memory safe. This poster comes across as potentially making this mistake.

[steveklabnik]

Thanks, that makes sense. I’m very interested in these kinds of perceptions, so I appreciate you taking the time.