[DonaldPShimoda]

If you hang around certain spaces of the internet (here, Reddit, etc), any sufficiently popular post about a Rust-related project is bound to accrue some comments along the lines of "Rust is actually not that great", "rewriting is bound to gain new bugs that won't be caught", "the borrow checker is practically byzantine and not worth the trouble", "C is perfectly adequate", "more advanced type systems are less useful than writing more tests", etc. I would even say that comments of this nature constituted a good chunk of the discussion around the US government's C-to-Rust initiative (a very popular post with a lot of comments).

[lenkite]

The Rust Blowback had some reasons: People arbitrarily opening bug-tickets on various projects saying they should be Rewritten in Rust for Safety. This became a Meme.

[burntsushi]

Just like some highly publicized cases of child kidnapping led to "stranger danger."

Reasons, yes. But not very good ones and blown way out of proportion.

[DonaldPShimoda]

In my experience, the majority of negative responses are rooted in fundamental misunderstandings of type systems and expressive power. The vast majority of everyday programmers are pretty much only familiar with Java or TypeScript when it comes to statically typed languages, and it can be hard to get people with that background to understand or appreciate the substantial increase in capability that systems like Rust's provide.

(The issue is further exacerbated, in my opinion, by the prevailing notion that test-driven development is superior to — or at least generally more than adequate for — anything and everything that could be desired. Years ago there was a tense Twitter exchange between Bob Martin [of "Clean Code" note] and Shriram Krishnamurthi [a prominent programming languages researcher and professor at Brown University] on this topic, Martin seemingly unwilling to move past a TDD-oriented worldview at that time.)

[ajkjk]

Ah maybe it's an another example of people using Twitter and the conflating the brainrot on there with reality.