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by spoiler 1205 days ago
But also, where is this malevolent, toxic Rust community that disgruntled C++ developers always engage with? I've yet to encounter a single person from this unstoppable force of sanctimonious assholes ruining everyone's fun on non-Rust projects. By their accounts Rust is a mental health catastrophe for our industry.

Anyway, shit posting aside. I do agree with them that the Rust community is a bit eager to suggest rewriting stuff in Rust.

However... I think this has always been the case for every developer who likes a language. I've seen Ruby devs talk with a passion for Ruby, and Elixir devs about Elixir, and Haskell devs about Haskell. You get the point.

Except I suspect Rust just incredibly grids the gears of some C++ devs. I see how it can be irritating, especial if they've decided C++ is the language they "settled in" with. There's the implied (and irrational) existential threat that this new technology is going to ruin their future prospects. This is probably subconscious and also completely irrational. C++ is too big and too commercialised to go away anyway.

I've seen a similar thing when TypeScript was being adopted and I was pushing for TypeScript (or Flow) adoption at work.

Some people seemed to have an allergic reaction to any mention of TypeScript.

There was people calling the TypeScript community toxic, immature, incompetent, holier-than-thou for arguing why types make code easier to maintain and write. And some of the arguments were they don't want to use the language that had such a childish community.

Edit: On second thoughts I feel a bit like an asshole too, and a bit regretful and ashamed I stooped so low to even write this comment. Others wrote more level headed replies than I did, too. Anyway, let it serve me as a reminder not to engage with trolls in the future.

1 comments

As polyglot dev, with love/hate relationship with almost any language worth using, until Rust gets free of "my compiler compiles yours", there is always an attack vector from those devs.

It was like this during the Usenet flamewars on C vs C++, and while I rejoice most C compilers now being written in C++, there are a few domains where C++ failed to take over C.

Rust advocacy strike force would do better to learn from history of programming languages adoption.

> until Rust gets free of "my compiler compiles yours"

I would better argue that "your Rust program runs on top of my millions of lines of C code, so please pass to my C API a pointer or a reference to a pointer so I can screw it up, and now all your safe code guarantees are out of the window".