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Comment by DataCrayon | Hacker News Reader

I must be experiencing a real case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I hadn't noticed this attitude towards Rust until yesterday, and now I've seen it multiple times since then.

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It is a bit of a meme, and I assume people are downvoting you due to its prevalence, but I suspect if you don’t spend a ton of time on cynical sites like HN and Reddit (at least the programming subreddits) you could very well miss this attitude. I haven’t seen the “rewrite it in Rust” attitude prevalently in most contexts.

I'd say it's a positive phenomenon. Many of us would like to see C/C++ replaced by something as fast but more modern. Each alternative has some problems, like being too slow (Python), or tied more to one platform (C#, Swift), or not being backed up by a big org (my favorites here are D and Nim), or having other issues (Java), or just too boring (Go). It looks like Rust finally got the momentum to become a language of choice for writing efficient apps, and with time the generated code might be on a par with C's. So I hope it succeeds, even though I wish it had happened with D.

It’s good if it’s grounded in reality. I don’t find Go being “too boring” to be a rational reason to not use it; it’s an accessible and convenient language that works well for applications without a lot of shared state among threads. Boring is good for security. Some would argue Go is not boring enough due to edges with CSP.

Rust is an accomplishment, but it’s also a very complicated language. It has a harsh learning curve and simply put, not all software written will benefit as much from the guarantees Rust provides. For a lot of software that will benefit the most, people are already experimenting with it.

seL4’s approach also seems interesting. It is doing C with proofs, which in theory should be able to offer stronger guarantees than even Rust if done correctly.

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