Kinda reminds me of the "coal vs. renewable energy" feud. The first tier arguments are formed around {economics, externalized costs, existing infrastructure, base load vs intermittent load} and then second-tier arguments align around {culture, history, identity, momentum, geography, political party}. You are making a second-tier argument against Rust when the article is making a first-tier argument for Rust.

I would argue that you are attributing to "the Rust community" the more outrageous attitudes which are a minority of the Rust community and ignoring the majority which have much more rational and banal attitude. And likely you are attributing the inverse to the existing C/C++ attitudes towards Rust (conveniently ignoring lots of the best arguments for Rust). It's exactly what happens in those feuds you described and in modern US politics (Democrats vs. Republicans, liberals/progressives vs. conservatives, secular vs. religious, etc). By focusing on the strawman arguments, you are missing the potential benefits of using a newer generation language.

I'm not using C and C++ professionally at all so the only place Rust has to fit in is fun or potential long term professional opportunity (assuming Rust is a fair bit more widespread than now by then, otherwise C and C++ win in the native field for employment opportunities), I'll not have fun (and I won't learn anything I don't immediately need that won't bring me fun) in a sea of vitriol against anyone who doesn't hate C and C++ so I'm happy Rust community guidelines forbid such idiocy in official spaces and documentation.

Rust is apparently targeting C and C++ devs but at the same time the ones that like it are going crazy and saying stuff about C and C++ being impossible languages (I agree they are by far the most spartan and hardest in the mainstream right now but not impossible as evidenced by lots of quite reliable software written in it, some that lives depend on).

Either the most obnoxious ones left, or they learned that this was not a productive approach. It's been refreshingly quiet lately...

But I disagree that there's a war every time Rust comes up, as a general thing. Many of the Rust proponents here are quite reasonable, willing to listen, willing to explain gently. (The conversation on the current article has gotten a bit out of hand, I'll admit.)

I wasted an hour and a half or even two here today as well, I at least got a reply from a Rust core team member who responded to me (yay), was nice enough and told me the community rules disallow wars, that's something I'd not get otherwise, but still, this feels very very unproductive in the end...

It is true that we built Rust to address shortcomings of C and C++, some some form of crtitique has to happen. But many Rust programmers, and especially Rust leadership, will gladly say there's still some good reasons to write C and/or C++ today. Many of those reasons will still be around for a very long time.

In any case Rust is still solidly on my list of things to learn to become a T-shaped person with lots of insight from different angles but it's annoying to even be unable to skim through comments without seeing garbage, this doesn't happen that often, even the Java, C#, C, C++ quartet stopped going at each other's throats online a long long time ago and it's just skirmishes now and not a constant onslaught.

As others have said, I think this is more of an HN issue than anything else; you won't see this kind of discourse in Rust-centric spaces. I know that's not super helpful, but I'm not a HN moderator, so...

I don't think you read the article. The author specifically cites lots of different types of hyperbolic "rewrite everything in Rust!" arguments and explains how this article is not that and he doesn't advocate for that. The author of the article advocates "surgically replace weaker parts but keep most of the project intact." This is exactly how Mozilla is dogfooding Rust in Firefox.

And no one is arguing that all of those C/C++ systems you mention are "FUBAR" -- that's a strawman. Rust advocates, as well as advocates of many of the newer-generation, lesser-used languages advocate for advancing programming beyond the languages designed in the 1970s. We've had an explosion in programming language diversity over the past 30 years and we've developed some great research on how to prevent certain classes of defects. The longer those C/C++-written systems exist without a rewrite in a safer language (or thorough audits including massive amounts of fuzzing), the larger the impact of inevitable non-zero-probability of those vulnerabilities which Rust prevents.

The article's author completely admits that at their best, C/C++ developers can avoid all of the problems that Rust solves. But not everyone is a rockstar and not everyone performs at 100% all of the time. Rust is written for humans and the compiler is a strict nanny, preventing you from getting yourself into danger, the same ways you can with C/C++ memory issues. It also has tooling for unit tests, benchmarking, fuzzing, and standardizing code formatting conventions in the language. You can bolt these things onto C/C++, but that means that you have to go find them (which new developers won't do unless sufficiently motivated to).

I consider Java browser applets unsafe trash and I'd never run one I don't absolutely trust. This person has similar (or even worse) opinion of C and C++ languages but runs tons of software in them with seemingly no problems since his idiotic comment made it in here and arrived to me intact despite all the C and C++ software on the way from him to HN to me.

I'm still a huge fan of C++ but Rust gets me to where I want to go with C++ with much less fuss and a lot more confidence.

Now Rust comes along with its safety claims (which are mostly true) and suddenly these computer users have what they believe is a legitimate complaint. They now see the frustrations with running C/C++ software as no longer facts of life but, instead, development externalities that users are forced to pay based on the decisions of the developers.

And so you have a bunch of people who've likely never written much in either C/C++ or Rust who are trumpeting Rust because they're sick of dealing with CVEs, segfaults and all the other 1970s baggage that the C-cosystem imposes. And it doesn't help that C/C++ developers tend to react defensively and take the advocacy as an impugnment of their developer honor. Saying "It's only inept C/C++ developers that write code with UB or memory safety issues. Disciplined developers can write safe C code!" just infuriates people even more since the weight of evidence suggests that any non-trivial C program will eventually have a bug or vulnerability of this kind. Humans make mistakes. That's an immutable fact that we need to take into account when relying on humans to do anything. Programming is a thing that is part of that anything. To err is human, to catch as many of those mistakes as possible is the compiler's job.

But I think both the Rust community and the Rust-resistant community should be wary of those trumpeting Rust who are part of neither of those groups. There are many good reasons to use Rust and some good reasons not to. Often times a hybrid Rust/C solution would be the best. We should be careful to try to take ego out of the decision making process as much as possible. And we should remember that when users are asking for Rust, what they're really asking for is an end to the pain that they've had to deal with. If it can be accomplished in some other way, then that works too.

Personally, I'm considering C++ for a new software project despite my extensive background in security. I think Rust is a great language, I just don't have much interest in it.

Yes, they work well enough, until they don't, because realistically, they are rife with dependencies on undefined behaviour. Linux can only be compiled with gcc last I checked.

Back then, wasn't it readable Python versus unreadable Perl?

Lua has it's own problems, of course, but I don't see it as a language developed as a consequence of frustrations with another.