This is how I feel about devs forcing rust onto web UI development (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35722681). JS exists and people already make new toys (frameworks) for it every month. That's not enough and now we need rust on the frontend

I care if it's written to be better and cheaper to maintain. I don't care about a new Javascript, Rust, or (latest religion) framework, this or that, unless the approach is better than what came before and it's part of sound governance. Code should not be religious, it should be functional and focused on its purpose.

I often advocate for the use of Rust, but it's not the right tool for every job. If one of these conditions is met, I'll happily use Rust:

  - Cannot have garbage collection
  - Need the raw speed of C
  - Need to provide a C interface
  - Already have a lot of Rust code in the project

Having said that, I very much prefer statically typed languages, and ones with a focus on correctness and safety. Rust and Haskell both fit that bill very well.

Thankfully most of that seems self-contained to Reddit/HN in pet projects. My god what a disaster for the web that would be, shoving everything into WASM despite zero performance reason to.

Nobody's forcing anything. This is hacker culture, and it's what drives progress. Get over it.

Hacker culture is great. Hacker culture is less great at work when I have to deal with over-engineered over-abstracted code that's hard to debug and solves simple problems in seemingly simple ways until inevitably you have to dive in and dig deep to figure out wtf is actually happening and good luck (this is how i imagine debugging rust UIs on the web will be)

I'm just ranting. I know in reality not every abstraction is correct and often they introduce more problems than they actually solve, but every once in a while the hackers get it right and that's when progress is made. In the meanwhile us normies have to deal with the experiments of complex bs to solve simple problems

Rust is actually pretty kind about most abstractions. Sure you can write creepy rust, but it requires a lot more effort to write creepy rust than it does in say C. More chances that a code reviewer will say "ugh this is too fancy", whereas in C some pretty crazy stuff can seem so innocent.

if you aren't smart enough to understand it doesn't mean it is "over-engineered over-abstracted"

Listen to them talking about it. This isn’t the sound of rogue group of developers focused on creating job security for themselves

https://youtu.be/8T6ClX-y2AE?t=2607

Developing in rust is so much easier than other languages I've used. Took a while to get the hang of it. It's honestly a wonderful experience. Can blindly follow types or hone in on performance critical areas without sketchy bugs.

How does any of that software engineering wankery bring any business value?

Well, if you watched the video you would know. Since they are removing whole attack surfaces, which means reduced exploits, which means more security, which at windows scale means millions of dollars saved in prevented security issues for companies across the world.

The way Microsoft wrote code for 40 years was an attack surface. The absurdity and fragility of DCOM and ActiveX without meaningful security or development rigor.

Ok? What's the point? Do you want them to invent a time machine and not do that? Is it a bad idea to fix the issues?

No, I want them to write better stuff going forward, which this seems to be.

It's like them finally admitting the emperor's new clothes is the king is naked.

Frankly, I don't care because Microsoft's ethos is one of hostility, neglect, and irresponsibility.

“Microsoft has a history of hostile neglect!”

[MS moves to responsibly maintain their codebase and patch previously overlooked vulnerabilities]

“Ugh why are they wasting all this tiiiime”

Closing the barn door after the cows left. Too little, too late.

Yesterday would be better, but there’ll never be a better day than today.

How is it too late when they are continuously producing new products?

I actually kind of agree with you, but my god man. Nothing may change today except the ability to innovate forward without living in fear of breaking shit. This is huge.

We are on a site called hacker news. Fuck your ignorant business value. The business view has always been bad at being a hacker & your degradation is just more heaped abuse from the know-nots. Have some decorum, so we smart knowing shit hackers can bother to put up with you presence without being in pain. Behave.

> I actually kind of agree with you [...]

Then it escalated really quickly.

“…these kinds of bugs were at the heart of about 70 percent of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities patched by the Windows maker in its own products since 2006.”

Associate a $ number to the average CVE then associate a reduction in total amount of CVEs.

On its own, absolutely none, which is true of everything that's not in service of a business solution. In general, how often are engineers held accountable for delivering direct business value anywhere rather than being subject to arbitrary favoritism performance ratings?

…the roles in question at Microsoft are literal business value since that’s their jobs.

Chill out and read the article.

Microsoft spends a lot of money on software security, particularly on a large body of software written by them in unsafe programming languages; spending less money is good business.

Microsoft makes a great deal of money selling software to companies and governments that are increasingly convinced that memory safe software is in their best interests; maintaining those business ties is also worth a great deal of money.

I think that "let people rewrite stuff in the new cool language/framework" is a deliberate strategy to retain midrange talent.

I can’t disagree more. I hesitate to hitch my cart to Rust, but rewriting all the old memory unsafe code is an inevitable need. This status quo of just patching things up every time an exploit appears is farcical when we have the tools to address these problems today.

I don't think it is so much about rewriting old code, rather new code is written in Rust.

I don't think it is so much about rewriting old or new code, rather code where security and stability are important is written in Rust.

Because when I think of what would give me the most job security, it's to reimplement something that we already have and works perfectly fine on its own.