[sambe]

I'm surprised to see you agree strongly. A Rust re-write for the political/ideological reason of "only using Rust" seems not good engineering by definition - it is not an engineering decision.

However, most of the time that someone would rewrite for the sake of using Rust, it would naturally be to get the advertised benefits of the language. If you believe you will have safer, more manageable code in pure Rust, you are making a valid choice.

The fact that efforts will be split is unfortunate, and should factor into such decisions. But that doesn't seem a strong argument on its own - if you believe such a change is for the better then there's no way to avoid breaking some eggs.

[steveklabnik]

I think we're differing on semantics.

> it would naturally be to get the advertised benefits of the language

I think "naturally" is doing a lot of work here; this is not "for the sake of using Rust", it's to gain the benefits of the language.

[sambe]

I agree, but naturally I think that’s the natural interpretation :)

Speculating: I think many Rust rewrite projects are criticised under “for the sake of it” when in fact there is a clear decision that Rust is just a better choice in 2019 (i.e. the decision was not political, but the criticism assumed it was). Many of those will nonetheless peter out because forks are hard. Such a result is only a partial judgement on the original decision.

[steveklabnik]

> I think many Rust rewrite projects are criticised under “for the sake of it” when in fact there is a clear decision that Rust is just a better choice in 2019

Yes, I think that's true as well.