“Rust’s compiler prevents common bugs” So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it. What is it with the rust crowd that they have to come acrosslike people trying to convert your religion at your front door?
At this point, I’ve seen far more people being almost violently anti-rust than I’ve seen people being weirdly enthusiastic about rust. If Rust people are Jehovah’s Witnesses, then a lot of the anti-Rust people are ISIS.
i think one factor (though definitely not all) of the dislike is the politics of the project, which are fairly inclusive and kind. some people can’t stomach that. another factor might be that the mere existence of rust implies that a lot of people are not the 100x rockstar developer they might aspire to be. maybe it’s also just a simple change = bad. though i have seen people who dislike rust also gravitate towards zig, and that also has some big differences. maybe it’s a hate towards mozilla? when i talk to people who hate rust they don’t articulate themselves well, so i have to speculate and i get nowhere. one thing i do hear about rust a lot is that it’s ugly, but I don’t really get that. i can’t personally fathom disdaining to use a tool simply because of looks, and i also don’t personally think rust is ugly.
I think a bunch of C programmers hate rust passionately because they always looked down their noses at principled languages for being slow.
Now a principled language is beating them on both speed and safety and it’s as if the jocks lost a baseball game to the nerds who studied dynamics of solids and cut a series of little slots in their bats so that every time they hit the ball it went out of the park.
So much hate for the clever win over the brute force.
Rust is a tiny bit slower in benchmarks with similar implementations, since it has a few more runtime checks, but the difference is minor.
All depends what your trade offs are. “Milliseconds of run time versus months of debugging.” I know one team that were died in the wool C programmers but their baby had one too many security issues and their CTO said they had to reimplement it all in rust. One of them resigned but the others spent ages on it. They hated the borrow checker with a passion, almost as much as they hated the CTO, but after a bit they admitted it had some benefits and in the end they have a love/hate relationship with it. They hate the process still, but they love the result. The Milliseconds vs months quote is from my friend on that team. He said one subsystem had a seriously massive speed boost because they turned off the logging they used to do to recover from some infrequent intermittent bug that simply doesn’t happen any more. They’re proud of what they did.
Yes, it’s true and a common trope that you can save development or rather debugging time with Rust, since it guides you in a safer direction.
For me, it’s all about the maintenance now. If it encourages you to write messy code, you will come to loathe your codebase. If it gives you clean, easy to navigate code you will love it more and more.
When I was a young programmer I couldn’t abide any boilerplate at all and loved clever magic that made it disappear. Now I don’t mind a bit of boilerplate and hate non-obvious machinery.
When I was young I bought the promise that object oriented programming would solve the software complexity problem, but now I think that at best it’s neutral and sometimes it makes it worse.
Correct me if I’m wrong because I never used Zig before, but I believe people like it because of the transparency in what the code is doing, like there’s no hidden functionality. Where as Rust definitely does do that.
Skill issue takes are dumb as fuck. It’s just republican personal responsibility takes using different language.
Intelligent people focus on producing systemically better outcomes.
Unlike you babies I have Personal Responsibility and I write all of my code directly in assembly the way reagan intended. I don’t need guard rails and I’ve never had any issues with it because my Personal Responsibility keeps me safe
Magnetised needle and a steady hand or gtfo
“Should I use rust or c++” is the wrong question IMO. The right question is “do I want the code I run, written by thousands or millions of randos, to be written in rust or c++”.
C’s compiler prevents common type bugs and handles things like register allocation for you? So does skill.
I love this argument because it means this dude is the only skilled C developer on the planet. Chromium devs are just chumps that should be replaced by this uncommon God.
If we measure only by the amount of mistakes, there would be much more skilled C developers. Take my pristine skills for example, I’ve made zero mistakes writing all of my 3 lines of C code over years and years, zero mistakes
“So does skill” I agree 100%
However, we’re human. You show me a skilled developer who never causes bugs, and I’ll show you a liar.
No matter how skilled or experienced a developer is, they always have the capacity to introduce a bug by accident.
Whether it’s a typo, or simply being tired or distracted, or just having one of those moments, or even one of those days. It’s completely normal.
Coding is just communication, and when working on larger codebases it can be just as nuanced as interpersonal communication. People miscommunicate every second of the day.
I’ve never used Rust.
Because most projects are worked on by multiple people, and you shouldn’t trust that everyone who will work on something will have the same skill level as you
If there are two languages otherwise equivalent in NFRs, where one lets you make the mistakes and the other doesn’t, you’re a bit silly if you don’t pick the latter.
Good engineers shouldn’t struggle to use a different language, so that’s not an argument
While I do totally see the advantages of rust and agree skill is not a solution given people make mistakes…I do agree a lot of the very vocal rust advocates do act almost religious and it is an annoying turn off.
We had the Java guys in year 2000, at least Rust seems to be a decent language.
Java was created so that teams of intermediate skill programmers could maintain large, long-lived code bases. And it did its job incredibly well.
If that is not your use case (or you do not want to admit that you are such a programmer), it may not be your favourite language.
I always like C# far better. It may be my favourite language overall. It has a bit more headroom and was designed somebody far more skilled. But it was designed to compete directly with Java. So, you know who it was built for.
Seems there still are some around!
I’ve never run into a Java evangelist. Every opinion I’ve ever heard about Java is something like “Yeah, this sucks”. I always thought that people put up with it because it’s write-once, run-anywhere, but so is, y’know, Python.
Early on, Java was advertized as the next great thing, ending headaches from system development, porting, and “promoting good programming practices through OOP”.
Then people increasingly got tired of OOP and the speed penalty of both that paradigm and the JVM, not to mention more and more education institutes started to claim Java was too hard for beginners, and that Python would be better.
Now we have Rust evangelists promoting the language as the next great thing, ending headaches from memory safety issues, porting (if you target WASM and pack your app into a Chromium instance), and “promoting good programming practices through FP”.
Time is truly a flat circle…
I love Java
I love Java and use it every chance I get
There was a saying back in the day, roughly: “java can run on all platforms like anal sex works on all genders”.
Python is slow but fantastic when it comes to interoperability IMO and is just complex enough that you can get the job done. I just hope they’ll won’t complexify it into oblivion, it’s a really neat language. IMO.
Do you have time to talk about our lord Rust? Did you know it died for our bugs so we don’t have to debug them at run time?
Everyone makes mistakes, no matter the level of skill
I can sympathize with some people getting tired of “rewrite it in Rust”, especially when it’s suggested inappropriately. (Worst I saw was an issue opened on something, maybe a database, I don’t remember. Someone said they were a new programmer and wanted to help and only knew a little Rust and that if the project was rewritten in Rust they could help.) But… Rust’s compiler being able to do those things is actually super useful and amazing. This is like someone saying they don’t need static types because they know the language good enough to not misuse the dynamic types. This is like someone saying they don’t need C because they’re good at assembly.
While it isn’t something as simple as Rust being strictly better than C/C++, it’s really silly to say that you being a good developer means you don’t need guardrails. Everybody makes mistakes all the time. You’re not perfect.
A real programmer only needs parentheses smdh
Gonna guess, basically the same thing. Easy answers to hard questions instead of you having to think about them.
So, as far as they would be concerned, the only reason more people haven’t chosen that path must be because they don’t know how much easier it is, and how much less they have to think about stuff.
They can’t see that building skill and knowledge has value beyond the extra effort.
I mean… they do kinda have a point on the last part. I’m no programmer or coder. I can’t code for shit. I don’t know a lot about development. And even I have the feeling that Rust people, they’re kinda like NixOS people a while back, they never shut the fuck up about it. :3
They’re definitely enthusiastic, I’ll give them that. But so many projects are sold solely on the fact that they are made with Rust, even though it means absolutely nothing to most users.
I remember when System76 announced that they were making a new desktop environment and the only thing they basically said about it back then was that it was made with Rust and it felt like my corner of the internet lost their mind about it like they had announced the second coming of Christ or something.
At my last job I worked in a code base written in C and it needed to be certified to MISRA level A, and even in a language with as many foot guns as C, it’s possible to write safe code. You just need to know what you’re doing. I know there are tons of Rust zealots out there claiming it’ll solve every last problem, but it turns out you just need to be careful.
it turns out you just need to be careful
Famous last words
