If I didn't include that proviso, I'd have someone arguing with me to the death about how I'm completely wrong and an idiot who doesn't understand the Correct Way of doing things.
It’s not useful criticism to simply say “this community was such-and-such”. I’d expect them to do better. Speak specifically to people saying something you disagree with. Don’t let it fester within you and then take it out on a broad group.
And I know you didn’t do any of this, but you did seem to be defending some pretty low quality behaviour.
Still, we, the Rust community, should take the high road and respond to the criticism by assuming that it's valid and asking what we can do better. I, for one, don't want developers to reject my Rust-based library because of the community's reputation, especially once my library has a C API.
I have to disagree. I think this meme/issue has been talked to death. And I'm sure I find retrograde, sour-pussing about Rust just as distasteful as others find dewy Rust optimism. The answer is -- they're both silly. Draw the line at speaking about the tech or the comment or person in front of you. Speaking about stereotypes in "communities" is about as vacuous as a Valley Girl's/Perl programmer's head[0].
[0]: a joke!
Anyway, shit posting aside. I do agree with them that the Rust community is a bit eager to suggest rewriting stuff in Rust.
However... I think this has always been the case for every developer who likes a language. I've seen Ruby devs talk with a passion for Ruby, and Elixir devs about Elixir, and Haskell devs about Haskell. You get the point.
Except I suspect Rust just incredibly grids the gears of some C++ devs. I see how it can be irritating, especial if they've decided C++ is the language they "settled in" with. There's the implied (and irrational) existential threat that this new technology is going to ruin their future prospects. This is probably subconscious and also completely irrational. C++ is too big and too commercialised to go away anyway.
I've seen a similar thing when TypeScript was being adopted and I was pushing for TypeScript (or Flow) adoption at work.
Some people seemed to have an allergic reaction to any mention of TypeScript.
There was people calling the TypeScript community toxic, immature, incompetent, holier-than-thou for arguing why types make code easier to maintain and write. And some of the arguments were they don't want to use the language that had such a childish community.
Edit: On second thoughts I feel a bit like an asshole too, and a bit regretful and ashamed I stooped so low to even write this comment. Others wrote more level headed replies than I did, too. Anyway, let it serve me as a reminder not to engage with trolls in the future.
It was like this during the Usenet flamewars on C vs C++, and while I rejoice most C compilers now being written in C++, there are a few domains where C++ failed to take over C.
Rust advocacy strike force would do better to learn from history of programming languages adoption.
I would better argue that "your Rust program runs on top of my millions of lines of C code, so please pass to my C API a pointer or a reference to a pointer so I can screw it up, and now all your safe code guarantees are out of the window".
The only reason why some are suggesting they haven't seen RESF recently, is because it has gotten to the point where the backlash, which used to be a minority and voiceless finally becomes the mainstream. And so they back down.
And to the original question, and in my previous comment, when was the last time you saw people telling you to use Zig in a Rust thread? ZERO. The comments are mostly, if not 99% about how they couldn't deal with Rust's complexity, they call themselves an idiot and they only wanted a Better C, which the answer to that question is always Das C, Zig or some other contenders. In which Rust Fans will always find it offensive. Even mentioning Ada / SPARK being a languages aiming for correctness is somehow "trolling". And it is not the first time I have been told to stop mentioning Ada.
And yet, how many times has Rust Supporters came into a Zig thread ( or other language ) telling the world how Zig / X is memory Unsafe and Rust does it better? To the point so detrimental that they founder of Zig is crying or begging publicly to give Zig the language some breathing space?
And finally I want to add, HN has a link for front-page [1] where you could visit every post that was listed in the front page. And comments as well as user post are not deleted unless specific circumstances which requires Dang to manually operate. i.e All the evidence are still there.
Because it's a better answer than smearing a group of people.
> So I should tolerate your ideals while you have zero tolerance with mine? Does it sound familiar to some real world Silicon Valley politics?
I will say that your argument does feel like modern American politics in one way I notice -- it's all about vibes. It doesn't have anything to do with anything technical. It's all about how people (sometimes transitively) made you feel. And I'm sorry someone made you feel that way, but I'm not sure the way you're acting is conducive to feeling any better.
But for weak-minded apologists who identify strongly with a programming language, the insult to newcomers must be invisible.
Others can read the entire comment themselves[0], but the pertinent part re: this individual discussing 'unsafe' can be found in the second graph:
"[W]hen you're learning new things and thus reading introductory material, you'll often see pithy statements that you may interpret as being commandments or something that is supposed to always be true, but in reality they are imprecise statements because it is just impossible to explain everything up front."
It's the kind of word game that extremely online people like to play.
I am actually teaching my toddler how to use a knife. So I'm not sure how that follows...
The GP is right. My comment was sincere and means the exact opposite of what you accuse me of "implying" or "dog whistling."
It's bargain. Rust is pretty great, but it doesn't make some things easy because it would everything else hard. This comment is amusing, mostly because Perl is full of tradeoffs. Do you want to write something to do some string parsing quickly? Great language, maybe. Do you want to understand what you've written later? Maybe not so great.
> Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case.
Not if you're using C, because the batteries are definitely not included. Want a resizable array, or hashmap? The answer is DIY. Not in the std library. Whereas all are provided by default in Rust. Picking a basic data structure off the shelf is a pretty nice feature for most applications.
That said -- should you really need a custom implementation of a linked list, and you need to write and rewrite such an implementation all the time -- I'd understand if Rust wasn't your first choice.
> Then, there's the 'community.'
And I'm not sure anyone loves this attitude either. Keep it technical.