Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eviks 879 days ago
<cue at least one complaint of this kind under almost any Rust-related project>
1 comments

The fact that this happens should be food for thought for part of the rust community. Because the way I see it, if they keep this up, a few years from now, they could, other than some obscure linux kernel modules almost noone uses and a good grep-alternative, be well along what I lovingly call the "Haskell Route".
Almost every single project that makes it to the front page of HN tells you as part of the opening sentences what language it's in. For a good while it was "<thing>, (re)written in Go". There's nothing special or unique in the rust community about this, it's just what people in tech do.

The type of complaining you're doing is also nothing new, because exactly the same occurs under those posts when it's the language de jour. A few years ago when it was all about Go, you could look in the HN comments and see people complaining exactly the same way about Go and the Go community.

What exactly should the takeaway be? Stop making things in Rust because people on HN will complain?
No, don't stop.

But it's an interesting observation, don't you think? Why is it that just by adding "... in Rust" you can almost guarantee that people will roll their eyes and think "oh, not another one".

Other languages do not carry such stigma, why does Rust have such reputation?

Completely guessing, but the thought comes to mind that Rust was (still is? I don't keep up these days) portrayed as The C Killer. So to specify "written in Rust" was to imply "I wrote something low-level without C/C++" or "I rewrote Popular C Tool in Rust" in the name of memory safety.

This is all wild speculation on my part, so please take it with a large grain of salt. I welcome alternative explanations or experiences.

> Completely guessing, but the thought comes to mind that Rust was (still is? I don't keep up these days) portrayed as The C Killer. So to specify "written in Rust" was to imply "I wrote something low-level without C/C++" or "I rewrote Popular C Tool in Rust" in the name of memory safety.

As the OP, this is a big part of it. Rust might be a great language, but people announcing they rewrote grep (for example) in rust doesn't mean they've done anything special. The rust language team did something special. The person making the announcement just took somebody else's idea and reimplemented it for very little reason.

Great! You learnt enough to reinvent the wheel. Now do something useful.

I don't know, but it certainly says more about the people rolling their eyes than it does about the people actually building things.
Who is "they"? Do you imagine all Rust devs as a hive mind?
> for part of the rust community.

part is the important term here.

I still don't see your original point. Sounds like you have an axe to grind. I don't see anything negative in saying "written in Rust" or "written in OCaml" or "written in Haskell" or anything else.

Using a particular language signals a certain subset of qualities and broadcasting those helps people filter what they are interested in.

> Sounds like you have an axe to grind.

Why? I just point out that what happened to Haskell can happen to Rust, and for much the same reasons.

What reasons might those be? I am not familiar with Haskell's history.

Are you saying that Haskell never got wide adoption because its advocates were too loud?

Even if you claim that I'll not believe it. Haskell is legitimately difficult for many annoying reasons, not least of which are the endless compiler variants.

It's only the Rust bit that seems to be problematic. I guess there is too much drama around that language?
I never saw any drama. People have broadcasted that they rewrite stuff in Rust, yes, and that seems to have triggered an exaggerated annoyance response in many.