[devjab]

It’s a cult, but you don’t have to join the cult. I use Rust both privately and more and more frequently professionally and I don’t really notice the cult community outside of smiling at it once in a while when it blows up on HN.

We’re mostly adopting rust to replace our C, to protect us from ourselves. It’s just so much easier to hand off these sort of projects to developers who mainly work with things like Java or C#. Partly because of the memory “safety” but also because things like enums work the way they expect them to being sum types, and so on. It’s also very clear when something is intended not to be mutable. The borrow checker is probably the biggest struggle, where with C, everything is a struggle.

Rust still has a long way to come though, and maybe it’ll never get there. I do think we’ll see an uptake as performance increasingly matters due to cloud costs and ESG. Right now though, I’d argue that unless you know why you “want” to use Rust then maybe you shouldn’t.

[CrimsonCape]

I saw your comment on an older C# thread in which you said (paraphrased) that C# is not bad, has nothing really stellar, and is just kind of bland.

If you could theoretically swap out the entire back-end of a programming language, and hypothetically you did that to C# by allowing developers to write C# styling and syntax that could be compiled to Rust, it would probably not be a big loss. The type primitives would be an apples-apples comparison at best, or "Rust is just better" if you really scrutinized the types closely. Where does that leave the rest of the language? A better regex implementation? Rust would probably win. A better GUI experience? Rust is speedily approaching usable APIs there at the same time Microsoft is trying to sunset the best they had.

I wonder if F# could be rebased on top of Rust...

[pdimitar]

Mostly agreed with your comment though I still have to remark that every community has zealots and it's mystifying to me why are people so annoyed by Rust's. So it's hard to agree that "Rust is a cult".

As you said, it's a pragmatic but also kinda niche language. I don't reach for it unless I can't do the job with others, easier and quicker to work with languages.

[AnimalMuppet]

> ... every community has zealots and it's mystifying to me why are people so annoyed by Rust's.

Because they're the ones that we keep hearing from right now. When it was the Haskell zealots showing up every few days, they were annoying. When it was the Lisp zealots, they were annoying.

[pdimitar]

Right now? Like where? Be specific and use arguments and not feelings.

[flohofwoe]

The C sphere is actually refreshingly free of zealotry (mainly I guess because there isn't such a thing as a "C community" and even despite C being the main attack target of language zealots - funny enough nobody complains about those pesky assembly coders and their hippie attitude towards memory safety lol).

The "religious zeal" was also an important reason why I switched back to C from C++ and why I don't have much interest in Rust. I can't quite stand the "holier than thou" attitude in.parts of those communities.

[pdimitar]

> This was an important reason why I switched back to C from C++ and why I don't have much interest in Rust. I can't quite stand the the "holier than thou" attitude in.parts of those communities.

This is 100% baffling to me. Let me explain.

1. Every single area has zealots. Yours included. And we're not talking only work. Every hobby area as well.

2. What the attitude of the most toxic 0.1% of the users of a thing is has exactly ZERO correlation with whether the thing is good and worth using.

3. By resisting only those 0.1% toxic zealots you are only demonstrating meaningless rebelliousness. As a supposed adult you should be immune to what are people hyping up and form your own opinion. INFORMED opinion. Not one based on the "many people praise it hence I, the intellectual, will stay far away from that obvious nonsense" stance.

4. Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, Rust is praised because it's actually good? Have you considered that the Rust community is not trying to cheat its way into your heart, and that the love Rust gets is justified by the people who need its features? Seems like you did not, and that's disappointing.

In other words, I have zero clue of your thought process here, maybe you can help me understand?

Back in my home town the VW Golf had an ardent fan base, yet one of my friends still bought one after he graduated. He didn't call the people who loved VW Golf zealots. He did his research and concluded that with his budget and mechanic skills the VW Golf is the ideal option.

Food for thought?

[flohofwoe]

I spent 20 years with C++ as my main language, and the endless and heated "style discussions" where personal.opinions are thrown around like facts were just tiring and a massive waste of time.

And it's such endless circular discussion where the extremists show up (I guess the equivalent in Rust is shaming projects that use unsafe, IIRC there have been quite a few dramas in the past). Shit like this is simply mentally exhausting, and in now 7 years of C as my main language I did not encounter this even once). In general C coders seems to be a quite relaxed, happy and tolerant bunch.

[pdimitar]

Restating your anecdotal evidence is just stubborn and does not advance any discussion but you do you.

You also addressed almost zero of what I said and asked you.

[flohofwoe]

In the end I did seriously look into Rust for a time and decided that's not my thing and instead watch progress from the sidelines in case anything interesting happens in the language to give it another try.

What's quite obvious when watching from the outside is that it's almost always people with a crab emoji in their profile who are more likely to talk shit about C programmers (myself included in a couple of cases via subtweeting).

I usually just shrug it off and move on, because what else is there to do?

[unkulunkulu]

As a supposed adult you should be ok with the fact that not everyone will like your favorite toy and way of life.

I don’t use rust because I don’t have enough time in my life right now for discovering a new language just for the pleasure of it and even if I had, my real alternatives would be functional languages, not rust vs C++ which I use daily in a big project that has incentives stacked into C++ favor

[throwanem]

If I responded in this fashion to someone who had already expressed concerns about a holier-than-thou attitude in parts of the community, I hope it would give me food for thought.

[pdimitar]

Just passing the ball? Yeah, I'd consider that + using a throwaway to be a set of circumstances that don't merit a response at all. ;)

I've already made my points several times. If you don't engage on the concrete arguments and are trying to be vaguely argumentative without substance then you're kind of polluting the replies.

Here's what should be a food for thought for you.

[throwanem]

Okay, and the direct version is that you responded to a general and rather vague comment about a holier-than-thou community by demonstrating in highly fluent detail exactly what that looks like in practice. To attempt a persuasive argument is by definition to engage in rhetoric. In the way you did so, specifically to persuade that the concern is unfounded, you behaved precisely as you sought to argue no one does. In short, you proved beyond doubt that your opponent's claim is valid. In rhetoric, there is no more abject form of failure.

Also, you behaved quite rudely as well as counterproductively - to the point that, if I felt any investment in the Rust community, I would now be asking you please to stop trying to represent it, at least until you can do so competently enough not to embarrass those you purport to defend.

If I found I'd erred as you have, it would bother me a lot. How you handle it is, happily for me, not my problem. But now at least you can't say you've never been told.

[nottorp]

In Europe (esp Eastern), if you take resale price into account you have to get a german car because everything else loses value faster :)

The VWs you can just dump on the fans.

I know, I live in a similar country.

[pdimitar]

The point is that the guy who was bombarded by feedback that VW Golf is good did not go out of his way to avoid buying it. He did his own research, formed his own informed opinion, and didn't go against the grain due to misguided notions.

Wink wink.

[jstimpfle]

You are bombarded by feedback too, such that these endless discussions are just tiring and mentally exhausting, and improving a language by overfocusing on security is just a massive waste of time. (In some areas, it could make the difference between economic viability or not, or between possibility of explorative prototyping and mental exhaustion from friction during development).

I am assuming that you did your own research, formed your own informed opinion, and ignored the feedback nevertheless because you know who is right :-)

[pjmlp]

Are you sure? The C sphere overlaps with the UNIX one, for obvious reasons.

[flohofwoe]

I can't remember Linux zealots raving irrationally about C though (although when googling I'm sure something will come up). Topics like Wayland or systemd on the other hand, oh my...

[pdimitar]

They are alive and well in this sub-thread of mine, quite a lot of them even. :) Down-voting and never engaging because who wants their bias challenged?

[pjmlp]

I said UNIX culture, not Linux.

Diving into the ruins of Usenet, or UNIX/C literature, will provide enough examples.