Hacker News Reader

Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

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".

View on HN

> 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.

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?

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?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com