[irishcoffee]

This gets so old. Rust is a programming language. It does some things really well, some things less so. It isn't a panacea, it's a tool. People can use it because they like it, right-tool-for-the-job or not. People can hate it, hating a programming language is one of the most benign things to hate in the whole world. "Language-ist" is a world I never want to live in.

Feels like there are some people who love rust, and some people who hate rust, and most everyone else doesn't give a shit. Everyone is right and everyone is wrong, depending on who you ask.

Can't we just go back to the emacs vs vi debate? Is that the itch people are trying to scratch?

[traderj0e]

The post doesn't hate on Rust, it's more saying you probably shouldn't use it for high-level code like a web backend. Which is pretty reasonable.

[tracker1]

Having written web backends for three decades in quite a few languages along the way, I disagree. You can definitely write some relatively simple backends in Rust. Tokio and Axum make it quite friendly, and depending on what you are connecting to it becomes super easy, barely and inconvenience.

Even if you cheat and do a lot of cloning across library boundaries, it's still likely to perform pretty well compared to a lot of prevailing frameworks. I'd say I'm most recently most familiar with C# and FastEndpoints as well as TS/JS and Hono, but I've used many others. I've also done a bit with Rust and Tokio/Axum and it's not been significantly worse than the former mentioned options. That said, the runtime containers are a fraction of the size, start significantly faster, and use a lot less memory with Rust. And once your boilerplate is in place (jwt/oauth, db context, etc), it's roughly the same work.

[vablings]

I have been churning away writing a custom backed in rust using Dioxus, it is excellent for this kind of high level work.

[scuff3d]

The annoying thing about Rust, or at least the hype around Rust, is that people want to in use it for bloody everything.

We have absolutely no need for it at work. We're writing micro services that run in K8s with no extreme performance requirements. Nobody on the team knows the language (I know it better than the people arguing for it, and I don't know more then the basics). And yet, every couple of weeks, I'm having to talk someone out of switching certain services over to it. It's like a damn disease.

[vablings]

Because the attraction of rust is powerful. The same toolkit allows you to write code for a microcontroller or a full fat arm webserver, the rules are the same and the language is strong.

The best bit about writing rust is the reason why it kinda sucks for corporations. You can "finish" your code

[irishcoffee]

Fair points, but this glosses over some of the not-great parts. Cargo isn't great. No sanctioned formal spec isn't great. Compilation times aren't great. Messing around with wrapping foreign types can be a bit of a bear sometimes.

It's a fine language, just like all the others. I'd rather write a web server in Go and a use C when targeting a micro-controller.

Almost reminds me of a quote I heard about python a long time ago: python is the second-best language for everything, and the "first-best" for nothing.

[vablings]

Sure, and that's probably because you are good with both Go and C. for me, I use rust as the hammer, and everything is a nail. Hobbyist vs Employee I guess

[irishcoffee]

No, it’s for the reason you said. Not everything is a nail.

[scuff3d]

Thank you for so aptly demonstrating what I deal with at work.

[deepriverfish]

also some of those people probably wanna put "used rust at work" on their resume

[mwigdahl]

vi would be much easier to rewrite in Rust.

[NoboruWataya]

Helix is in fact written in Rust and is now a frequent contender in the editor wars.