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by darksaints 2193 days ago
Everybody that talks about rust is talking from a different perspective with different values. What makes rust different from other languages is the breadth of use cases for which rust is a candidate worth mentioning. That's not so much an obsession as it is an availability bias on your part. You're seeing different people talk about rust obsessively in different contexts and assuming that those same people talk about rust in all contexts.

If any of these features is of significant value to a programming use case, it is worth talking about rust:

* Speed

* Type safety

* Memory safety

* Memory determinism

* Latency

* RAII-based resource acquisition and destruction

* Concurrency correctness / safety

* Minimal runtime requirements

* Low level bit manipulation (eg. Cryptography, compression)

* Startup time

* Networking

This isn't exhaustive, but it gives a lot of different people in different domains working on different problems a reason to talk about the same language when comparing to their usual choices.

2 comments

I don’t know if this explains the entirety of the phenomenon but I do think this post helped me understand at least a portion of the pervasive mention of rust in almost any programming conversation on HN, which makes the fact that happens slightly less frustrating.
yes, but the article is discussing Generics in Go. Nothing to do with Rust. Rust is absolutely NOT worth talking about in this context.
You do realize that the lack of generics in go pushed a lot of go programmers towards rust, right? This feature of go is long overdue, and many people gave up on trying to get them implemented. The fact that they are now available has many programmers wondering if it is even worth switching back.

That is context for discussion, and yes, it is relevant. Directly relevant, in fact.

I get that. And that's a great discussion for the Rust community to have.

I wanted to hear what Go devs have to say about this latest iteration of the generics proposal. But to do that I have to wade through endless comments about type systems and Rust. Even on comments directly talking about this iteration and how to use it, every other reply starts with "In Rust..."

If implementing generics leads more of the Rust community back to Go, then from what I've seen here: no thanks. I have a feeling we'd see every conversation in every community forum start with "In Rust.."

> I get that. And that's a great discussion for the Rust community to have.

It's also a great discussion for the go community to have. The only problem here is that it's not a discussion you wanted to have. Should every discussion about go revolve around you and your wants?

If all you wanted was to hear what the go devs wanted to say, you could have clicked on the link and read it. Or could you possibly use the feature that was built for you: the [-] button to collapse a thread. Or maybe, just maybe, you could go to a place that is explicitly only about go, like /r/golang.

I'd be totally cool if it was this once, and actually interested.

But it's every freaking time. Every single time Go is mentioned, there's a ton of Rust folk commenting on how Rust does it (better).

Just for once, it'd be nice to have a comment thread discussing a Go-specific item, that has nothing to do with Rust, without talking about Rust.

And yeah, /r/golang is at least Go-focused. But it has its own problems too. Mostly PHP and JS folks learning Go and asking basic questions (which would be great if they didn't then reply to the answers with "but that's not how PHP/JS does it, why does Go do it so strangely?" and without reading any of the billion answers for that question already).

Sorry if my exasperation is showing ;)

No I do not realize that at all. It's like saying "Lot of Americans will renounced their citizenship if Trump won" Yes a lot of people said that but I am not sure if there is data to conclusively say it happened in either case.

The only cases I know of are people moved to Rust to avoid GC pauses.