Comment by Decabytes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Decabytes | Hacker News Reader

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This huge blog post goes over some of the challenges of using Rust. https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/

For the community I'll pluck out this paragraph

> That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you get good enough things will make sense". This is not just with Rust, if you try using ECS you're told the same thing. If you try to use Bevy you'll be told the same thing. If you try to make GUIs with whichever framework you choose (be it one of the reactive solutions or immediate mode), you'll be told the same thing. The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough.

I've experienced this same feedback when I was struggling with Rust. One time when I posted in the Rust subreddit about it seeking help and talking about my struggles, I got the unhelpful response of "I believe in people" as a dismissive response to my struggles. Admittedly this was years ago and I've since moved on from Rust, but the blog post is dated from 2024-04-26, so it appears the issues with the language still remain

It's not specific to Rust at all, I remember hearing the same kind of talks when learning Java because I found OOP confusing.

And in fact most people saying that are right: most of the time people complain about stuff because they haven't internalized how it's suppose to work (as I was).

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of valid criticism of Rust or Java (and OOP in particular), but at the same time in practice most of the people who complain aren't at the level of understanding and their criticisms aren't good.

Both are true at the same time:

- every programming language has terrible flaws.

- 99.9% of the criticisms you'd see online about a programming language in particular are garbage.

> It's not specific to Rust at all, I remember hearing the same kind of talks when learning Java because I found OOP confusing.

You're right, but that doesn't excuse it. And most languages don't have this as their first bullet point in their code of conduct

>We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.

What is the point of a code of conduct if you can't rally the community around the first part of the first bullet point. If people are still experiencing toxicity on the level of other communities that don't have a code of conduct, then it's not working and the leaders of the Rust community should do something about it.

> the leaders of the Rust community should do something about it.

You should read the reaction of the Rust community leaders to the quoted article, and you'll see that they share your opinion that something must be done.

At the same time when you have people in the community saying politely and cheeringly that “you'll get over it when you've internalized the rules” what are you supposed to do as a mod? It obviously doesn't infringe the code of conduct even though it seems to have offended the author of the article.

Also, when what the people get pissed of about a community is “they don't want to admit it doesn't work” it's had to say that the toxicity is “people are still experiencing toxicity on the level of other communities that don't have a code of conduct”, by any means…

The goal of a CoC is to make sure nobody gets bullied or harassed, not that nobody will ever get annoyed by other people. You can't make sure you don't have idiots in your community, all you can do is making everyone behaving in a civil manner, which is already hard enough.

Thanks!

I think the loglog post is great and the community (as I perceived it) basically unanimously agreed that there are sharp corners and lots of room for improvement, especially in ergonomics.

Yep, communication is hard, and it's ... not an easy problem to be a volunteer based project, with a disavowed subreddit where most people get their first contact with the community.

I personally have no experience with Bevy or anything Rust 3D (well or any 3D really except for some tinkering with GLEW 10y ago :D), but the GUI problems are real. Documentation is scarce (no, vomiting types into a HTML page is not documentation, thx).

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