[otikik]

Antirez, I respect you immensely. I know you know what you are talking about. I do think that there's too much hype around rust.

That said, I also think that we live in a world where a little bit of clickbait or hype-riding is admissible. The economics of the thing make it almost mandatory. I would just acknowledge the hype, nod in disagreement, and move on. At the end o the day this is about someone tinkering with a language they enjoy. Let them have that.

[antirez]

I believe that some hype / over-enthusiasm is acceptable, but I'm a bit more worried when a given community uses it as some kind of organized propaganda, arriving to excesses like saying that writing code in non-safe languages should be considered immoral, and also never admitting that Rust is a compromise in the design space like anything else. So ok for the hype, but sometimes I see some excesses. Anyway this is just my very limited opinion, I don't claim to be right, I just believe my feeling represents some part of people here.

[dragonsh]

Like you said its fine to promote language on its merit, but using false propaganda to promote it borders fraud and Rust community needs to act together to stop such practices.

Overhype within Rust community is a sign of fear among the community that some simple language (may be zig, nim or something new) might come and pull the rug under their feet. Given it compromise on simplicity in favour of quashing memory safety bugs.

One reason rewrite in Rust is popular because its easier to copy something already done vs doing something original (one recent example came to mind is rewriting gnu coreutils in Rust).

[odiroot]

Thank you for your comments :)

[rcxdude]

Especially when the hype is added by a third party. This is an article about a hobby project written in a few weeks and yet the headline suggests it is somehow a serious contender for being added to Linux (right now at least. Maybe something grows out of this, most likely not)

[ksec]

>Especially when the hype is added by a third party.

I think this is ( or should have been ) obvious but also an interesting observation. At least it never came across my mind. The Hype driven feedback loop that generate a positive ( so to speak ) hype cycle.

The Rust community has definitely toned down a lot of their evangelism in the past 2 years. After obviously enough people came out to say enough is enough. But the third party continue the trend regardless.

[bheadmaster]

> I would just acknowledge the hype, nod in disagreement, and move on.

Which is exactly what he did, in addition to also acknowledging the pattern of the Rust community using hype to attract attention. He didn't force anything onto anyone, he just expressed his opinion.

[loeg]

Don't mistake Phoronix as any more representative of the Rust community than it is of the Linux kernel community.

[Yoric]

To be fair, I've seen this happen with every language community.

[bheadmaster]

Every community has a hype period, true.

But I don't think I've ever seen any other community (except C++, 20 years ago, perhaps?) being so vocal about wanting to rewrite the whole software ecosystem in their language. "Rewrite it in Rust" is basically a catchphrase now.

[Pet_Ant]

> But I don't think I've ever seen any other community (except C++, 20 years ago, perhaps?) being so vocal about wanting to rewrite the whole software ecosystem in their language.

cough NodeJS cough

[Yoric]

I remember the Java community attempting to rewrite the world in Java (Jazilla, anyone?)

I remember web browsers written in Perl.

We live in a world where everything is being rewritten in JavaScript.

etc.

[bheadmaster]

True. I suppose the main difference is that nobody (in their right mind) was ever advocating for rewriting fundamental system components such as Linux (the kernel) and all the GNU system utilities in Java/Perl/JavaScript. If they were, then I completely missed them.

[Yoric]

I think that's mostly because there hasn't been any new mainstream language with the feature set and compilation model needed to port fundamental system components for a while. I remember lengthy debates about porting just about everything from C to C++ in the Linux world and even C++ was deemed unsuited for many reasons (with which I generally agree).

It turns out that Rust is compelling enough that it makes sense to investigate porting lots of things to it. I don't think anybody knows for sure exactly for which projects Rust is better than C (or C++), but I know that Google has ported many fundamental C++ projects to Rust and they're happy enough that they're continuing this trend.

[jacquesm]

Only if it doesn't harm your cause, which it does.

[iknowstuff]

What do you think their cause is?