Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

I agree, these ignorant Rust fanboy comments don't help Rust gain any goodwill, and even convey the idea that their vocal proponents are clueless and completely out of touch with basic industry requirements. It's unthinkable for any project to just casually drop everything and go for a complete rewrite in entirely different programming languages and tech stack. But this blend of Rust fanboys keep on insisting this is a reasonable thing (only when it's Rust, oddly) and have the gall of trying to turn things upside down and make believe that it's unreasonable to not jump head first onto a major rewrite.

View on HN

I've spent quite a bit of time amongst the Rust community, and I have never actually seen any of these RiiR evangelists that are complained about so much on HN.

I'm not saying they don't exist, but they are a much smaller portion of the community than HN would have you believe.

They are like the Bernie Bros of programming languages.

> I've spent quite a bit of time amongst the Rust community, and I have never actually seen any of these RiiR evangelists that are complained about so much on HN.

You're telling me you don't see "why not rewrite it in Rust" posts in a forum dominated by people who are enthusiastically working on Rust codebases?

In the meantime, you did noticed that RiiR is already a meme, didn't you?

This is why I always make remarks regarding how Rust still doesn't have a proper solution for many ecosystems where C and C++ are the only available tools (with an ecosystem, not only the compiler), which will be around for decades and need to be catered for somehow, and if one can live with automatic memory management, there are plenty of safe languages to chose from.

When one comes with this advocacy that safety === Rust in every discussion thread, this automatically shuts off the recipient of the message, which could otherwise be willing to actually listen to it.

Exactly this. It shows a very limited exposure to the realities of the IT world and the vast amount of legacy code and systems that is out there that really are not going to be rewritten in Rust or any other language any time soon and likely not ever. Rust isn't a silver bullet, and besides the value of a battle hardened codebase is substantially greater than the value of a freshly rewritten codebase in any other language.

'Rewrite it in Rust' is a mantra that makes a whole slew of assumptions that need to be validated before it can be considered a realistic option.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com