Sadly, this appears to be true. For whatever strange reasons, Rust (and Zig) are glazed and hyped beyond any sense and way out of proportion to their language rankings (see TIOBE)[1]. Rust is not even in the TIOBE top 10. Zig is barely in their top 50.
These two languages look like they have a weird kind of "protected and special status" on HN. Other programming language don't get anything like the push and special treatment that these do.
> If you want to be flagged and down voted, just write a critic about Rust.
Nonsense. It's not all that hard to find well-received stuff on HN critical of Rust (e.g., from a quick search there's [0, 1, 2] and plenty more, especially around async and/or deps). The key is to write substantive/thoughtful/constructive criticism. In fact, that applies in general - substantive/thoughtful/constructive articles/comments are much more likely to be well-received no matter their topic.
This article does touch on some of Rust's weaknesses/pain points, but does an absolutely atrocious job of doing so. Right off the bat you have this:
Example comparison (small benchmark):
# C++ (g++)
$ time g++ main.cpp -o main
real 0m0.4s
# Rust (cargo build --release)
$ time cargo build --release
real 0m9.7s
Yes, Rust's compile times can be long, but if you wanted to demonstrate that then this is pretty much the worst possible way to do so as not only is it not comparing apples to apples (it's comparing a debug build to a release build) but we don't even know what is being compiled!
And it's pretty much downhill from there. Like this:
> Suddenly, the compiler starts screaming:
error[E0515]: cannot return value referencing local variable
Well yes, that's an error. It's also wrong in C++. In fact, C++26 makes (some forms?) a hard error as well, so C++ is moving to match Rust in this respect.
The code organization example is yet again not an apples-to-apples comparison. It's also straight up wrong to boot.
The migration decision tree is inconsistent as well. If "memory safety is your #1 priority", then C++ with sanitizers is definitely not a viable option.
So on and so forth. If you want to write Rust criticism and be received well, this is definitely not the way to do so.
> Much more superficial stuff flies on this site and even gets hundreds of upvotes.
Sure, but the fact that one thing gets one kind of reception but another thing gets another tells you little since HN is not a monolith. Different people read different things, have different thresholds for flagging stuff, so on and so forth.
> You haven't explained why this is flagged.
My comment was not an attempt to explain why the post was flagged in the first place?
It's not like I can give a definitive reason for its flagging either, since a) I don't know the precise manner in which HN's software determines whether something is flagged or not, b) I can't read the minds of everyone who flagged the article, let alone try to determine whether their reason for flagging was "valid" (assuming I'm even qualified to make that determination), and c) I have no idea if the moderators manually flagged this article. I can make guesses, sure, but it's not like my guesses would be worth any more than yours.
If you see something is flagged and think it should not be, the best way to try to resolve the issue is to either vouch for it, or if that doesn't work, email the moderators.
I don't think I have enough points to vouch for anything. The rules about how many points are required to do things seem to promote a hive mind phenomenon.
If you're not trying to explain why this thing is flagged, or at least why it isn't flagged, idk why you are in this thread. But it's all good.
> I don't think I have enough points to vouch for anything.
Based on this [0] (and a few other random comments search engines pulled up) the points threshold for vouching is supposedly 31. It does appear that I misunderstood the vouching functionality, though, since apparently it's supposed to counteract [dead] posts, not [flagged]. My mistake!
> The rules about how many points are required to do things seem to promote a hive mind phenomenon.
As with many things, it's a tradeoff. Having a points threshold also makes it harder to abuse new accounts to manipulate flags/votes/etc., so there's no free lunch here.
> If you're not trying to explain why this thing is flagged, or at least why it isn't flagged, idk why you are in this thread.
My intent was very specifically to push back against the claim that Rust criticism is a surefire way to get downvoted/flagged. The tl;dr is that good criticism of Rust is well-received, and this article is not a good critique and so it's not all that surprising that it was not well-received.
It is just rage-bait without content. Like made-up benchmark without specifying what it was comparing. Showing code that actually works and then providing error message that is not related or caused by that code. Etc.
If it helps, GPTZero rates the text as 99% AI-generated. In addition, the whole article has a patter that's very typical of LLM-writing, fond of short phrases and reversals. You might also consider that the medium page it's pulled from posts short daily articles on programming, full of surface-level takes on language and technology choice without going into serious technical detail or providing biographical detail about the author, their work, or their projects. Or, most clearly, you might notice that those articles are replete with ASCII flowcharts--something a human writer would almost certainly not bother with in favor of just drawing them, but which is very easy for an LLM to output.
All of this points quite clearly to this being LLM-generated. But, as I pointed out in my other comment, as have others above, it's just not well argued. The points are shallow and don't adequately support the claims made. It looks to me very much like someone churning out posts on surface-level topics by prompting an LLM, either not having the expertise to tell the quality of the argument or just not bothering.
Rust is one of these topics. If you want to be flagged and down voted, just write a critic about Rust.
Even tell about this is a motive to be down voted.