[benreesman]

I mean "message" how you want, HN is hosted in a free country.

But N=1 for you: as a serious polyglot user of Rust who knows it well and uses it all the time: this shit is a huge turnoff. It's a programming language. On a long enough timeline all the motivated hackers will end up knowing many programming languages well, they all have pros and cons.

Trying to boil important engineering decisions down to a tweet so that we can stay "on message" comes off like something someone would do if they were selling books or training or consulting services attached to a technology, which a priori gives them an agenda other than giving good advice.

So to keep it short: help people pick the right tool for the job without an agenda.

[jamincan]

I think you have a point. Rust is primarily focused on being a systems language, and memory safety is the killer feature it brings to the table in that domain. But we know that Rust is being used in areas where its qualities as a systems language are less important.

Why, for example, would a Python developer pick up Rust? Probably because of the really strict typing addressing a major pain point for most Python developers and the trait system being somewhat analogous to Protocols, which any Python developer who has chafed with the dynamic typing is almost certainly already familiar with. With good library support for interfacing between the two, it's a more natural coupling than most people would think on the face of it.

That said, while I don't think a Python developer reaches for Rust because of memory safety, I do think it's still an important factor as it provides the guard rails that make it so someone who has primarily used a GC language and not had to concern themselves as much with managing memory can start using Rust knowing that the compiler is not going to let them accidentally shoot them in the foot when it comes to memory management.

[bluejekyll]

Rust is a programming language. It’s the right tool for the job of programming. It happens to have a lot of features that make it a very good programming language.

I think you’re wrong about the language and community, though. It’s killer feature is it’s safety, be it memory, data race, or type. These are the reasons I was interested in learning the language. The fact that the tools make that easier is why I was able to struggle through the new concepts and actually be able to build useful things with it.

If the fact that people enjoy something as a general community turns you off, that’s not the community’s problem.