What’s being ‘sold’ is the speed of Rust not the novelty of the language choice

Saying "written in Rust" as a proxy for performance is a bit like saying "X in Y kb" in JS-land for the same reason. It says nothing about actual performance. One needs to show benchmarks if they want to have a convincing performance argument.

Why would speed matter for something that runs a few regexps over some commit messages once a month? I would have chosen Perl for this task: good enough speed for the task, excellent built-in support for regexps, templating libraries like the Template Toolkit, and flexibility around things like loading custom modules at runtime and parsing configuration.

Got to admire how smoothly we went from "Props for not selling language x for this" to "I am selling language y for this" in just 3 consecutive posts.

Language choice is a legitimate decision, debating which one to use is a legitimate topic. Selling an-already existing product based on its language is questionable, as the parent pointed out.

It could matter in edge cases, perhaps someone runs this on google3 or the linux kernel and it takes 10 seconds versus a minute+ on something like Perl (not sure if that's the case).

I agree. If that's really one of the requirements then Rust or C++ or OCaml or something like that would make a lot of sense.

Also I'd like to add to my original comment above: I don't care at all that this is implemented in Rust. Good on you. Open source software goes where the developers go, and isn't dictated by anything except what the developers want to do.

We don't need more of the "git-[whatever]" commands to be in scripting languages. It's hard enough to bundle, distribute, and support as it is (especially on Windows). Though, yes, parts of it are already Perl so that probably would have been fine, but still a move in the wrong direction.

I would argue that people aggressively (perhaps annoyingly) evangelizing Rust is part of how it has come to be "normalized" now. People were doing the same thing Go several years ago.

Also I am not bothered by it; I personally find it interesting when a tool is implemented in a language that I find interesting. If it's a language I don't care about, I shrug and move on.

Are you bothered when somebody says "implemented in C 99"?

If you're at the point of looking at the source code, The language used for implementation might actually be relevant to you, when making a choice about whether to use a piece of software or library.

It bothers me because it may lead to overexploitation and turning a great language(rust, being my absolute favorite at this very moment) into an abomination from the depths of hell. Similar to what we've seen with many languages over the years.

Library - yes, of course it matters what it's written in when I'm choosing it. Software - no, not really, as long as it does what it's supposed to do, C, C++, go, erlang, java, kotlin, python, julia, rust or brainfuck for all I care - sure, god speed.

> Are you bothered when somebody says "implemented in C 99"?

Ironically, I felt this was your strongest argument because I am bothered when someone says that... like, I am first bothered that someone thinks the language their tool is written in is a selling point, but then I am additionally bothered (even somewhat enraged) that anyone considers their project being written in C99 (and not at least C++, and even explicitly so) to be a selling point!

Like, whenever I see "implemented in C99" I tend to be able to very quickly find a few buffer overflows or memory leaks as it is so hard to dot all your eyes and cross all your tees manually in every single function (with the consequent annoyance that I say the code is likely buggy, get challenged to find a bug, find multiple sometimes only even a few minutes later, and then the goal posts shift to "well we fixed the bugs you found, so we're fine")... and so I guess "implemented in Rust" us at least telling me the code that implemented the tool I am about to use is more likely to be correct? ;P

Fair enough.

> so I guess "implemented in Rust" us at least telling me the code that implemented the tool I am about to use is more likely to be correct?

This was my point! It's information for potential consumers, that might or might not be interesting or relevant to you.

Also some people just like talking about how they did something, not just what they did. Maybe they're proud to show it off or they want to let people know about whatever cool thing they like.