Comment by shruubi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shruubi | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me, but every time I look at Rust I'm either turned off by the community or by this constantly shifting idea of what is best practice.

A lot of comments have talked about the idea of writing Rust like it is X year, which seems weird to me as I would imagine that a language with a strong ecosystem would not create a situation where five-year old code that was considered ok then is now looked back as bad code and a reason for derision. Besides the obvious learning better ways to do things as time goes on, shouldn't code written five years ago still be good if it works? Is code being a few years old the only excuse we need to rebuild it?

Maybe I'm wrong here, but what I want is to not have to think to myself a year after I build something "well, that was built in last years standard, time to rebuild in this years standard."

The "community" you're paying attention to is made up of enthusiasts, so it's to be expected that they tend to be in the camp of adopting new shiny things as soon as they're released. The same thing happens in C++; you'll often see reddit / stackoverflow telling you to stop using new/delete in favor of make_shared and make_unique, stop using loops in favor of functions from `<algorithm>`, and so on.

Regardless of whether the new additions make the language better or not (I believe they do, in both Rust's and C++'s case), adopting them immediately in the codebases you are responsible for is your decision. You have to decide by yourself whether the pros from adopting the changes are enough to offset the cons of making changes. If you conclude that the cons outweigh the pros, and if it bothers you that the "community" derides you for not tweaking your code, then a valid solution is to stop paying attention to the "community" and get on with your life.

> writing Rust like it is X year

Are you reacting to the talk about "editions," e.g., Rust 2015 and Rust 2018? Those are actual concepts in Rust, similar to how C has C89, C99, and C11. I personally don't feel compelled to rewrite working code in newer editions. I have, however, received at least one PR from someone else who felt compelled to do so without asking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com