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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

People have gotten fed up with smug rustaceans shouting about 40 year old technology.

If only that 40 year old technology could have captured attention in the last 40 years.

I don't think an Adacian missionary has ever knocked on my door. Rustafarians were twice a week at some point.

Maybe the rust folks realized that 40 more years and billions of dollars wasted on "we'll get pointers right this time and not leave the same old gaping holes in our new software" left people receptive to new things?

They probably have another good reason to advocate too - 90% of anti-rust sentiment is "Gross, people like using it so much they tell others that they like it".

> 90% of anti-rust sentiment is "Gross, people like using it so much they tell others that they like it".

More like "Gross, people like using it so much they imply (or just outright say) other languages are inferior."

edit: apparently I'm "posting too fast", so I'll reply in an edit. What you (sophocles) said is effectively equivalent to "other languages are inferior", although I appreciate how you twisted the words up like that. Computers can be used effectively in a wide variety of languages. Do some languages age poorly? Sure. But not all of them.

Nah, that's just the listener's ego overreacting to someone acknowledging that the obsolete, and factually inferior language they like is in fact obsolete and factually inferior. For a long time the world bought into C is best for X, Y and Z things and it's the only real choice... so people did that human thing and tied their identity to using that particular language, their subconscious has decided that they are being called inferior because they think the tool is their value rather than their ability to reason deeply about what computers are going to do.

We're all still waiting for that professional grade Rust OS to come to market and put lesser languages to shame.

I don't know if "putting lesser languages to shame", but https://hubris.oxide.computer/ is professional grade, built in just a few years.

But I absolutely take umbrage at the idea that "build a modern production OS" is the bar to clear for any new language to prove themselves because modern OSes are rare regardless of language of implementation. How many "professional grade OSes" have even been released in the last 10 years?

Right. After Java in the mid-90s, Rust has become the most hyped language. Meanwhile C/C++ have been quietly adding in wisdom from lessons learned in the trenches and have gotten much better.

Next time a rustacean starts jumping up and down, show them Raphael Finkel's book Advanced Programming Language Design so that they can understand there is nothing new under the sun.

Do you use CBMC or other model checkers to make sure that your code doesn't contain any UB or memory related bugs?

Are you going to tell me that Rust doesn't need such tools?

IMO The language has merits regardless of a few (if not very few) bad apples in the community, and its technical merits should be the primary lense for evaluating it as a choice.

I'm more fed up with smug rustaceans acting like everything Rust does is somehow novel. Just because *you're* not aware that a language feature already existed earlier doesn't mean Rust invented it.

The whole point of Rust was to take developments in programming language theory from 20 years ago or so and make them practical for widespread use. Practically nothing Rust does is new, because "new" stuff means that the overall implications of that language feature have yet to be figured out. Which is bad if you want to keep your language elegant and easy to learn.

> Practically nothing Rust does is new

That's my point in a nutshell. It's a cool language. But there's a growing number of converts for whom this is their first introduction to these concepts, and they don't seem to have the intellectual curiosity to dive deeper.

I also see this behavior with Typescript and "powerful type systems"

People will point out features they like about Rust, sure. But I've never seen anyone be smug about it, or claim they're novel features.

Edit: Maybe these types of low quality comments exist on social networks, but... Isn't that just the norm for social networks? You can say the same about cooking advice on social media, or "life hacks" content, etc

Is there another language out there which encodes lifetime semantics and affine types besides Rust? AFAIK there isn't (happy to hear otherwise though).

I have had some back-and-forth with some rustaceans here on HN and most seem to be cargo culting. I am all for enthusiasm/evangelism when there really is something noteworthy but not blind religious fervour. Graydon Hoare/Manish Goregaokar are on record saying they took good ideas from old (and lesser known) languages and putting them together in Rust based on their view of how a modern language should be like. Obviously this is not a bad thing but folks need to be aware of history and how they got to where they are now.

Rustaceans would do well to read something like Raphael Finkel's book Advanced Programming Language Design where a whole bunch of languages and their unique features are shown/compared.

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