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by bheadmaster 883 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
loeg 883 days ago
Don't mistake Phoronix as any more representative of the Rust community than it is of the Linux kernel community.
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Yoric 883 days ago
To be fair, I've seen this happen with every language community.
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bheadmaster 883 days ago
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.

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Pet_Ant 883 days ago
> 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

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Yoric 883 days ago
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.

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bheadmaster 883 days ago
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.
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Yoric 882 days ago
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.

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steveklabnik 882 days ago
> I remember lengthy debates about porting just about everything from C to C++ in the Linux world

Fun fact, the kernel patchset to do this was recently resurrected https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/3465e0c6-f5b2-4c42-95eb-2936148...

We'll see!

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