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My skill prevents bugs, unlike your fancy compiler, peasant.
(programming.dev)
"Rust's compiler prevents common bugs" So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it. What is it with the rust crowd that they have to come acrosslike people trying to convert your religion at your front door?
At this point, I've seen far more people being almost violently anti-rust than I've seen people being weirdly enthusiastic about rust. If Rust people are Jehovah's Witnesses, then a lot of the anti-Rust people are ISIS.
i think one factor (though definitely not all) of the dislike is the politics of the project, which are fairly inclusive and kind. some people can't stomach that. another factor might be that the mere existence of rust implies that a lot of people are not the 100x rockstar developer they might aspire to be. maybe it's also just a simple change = bad. though i have seen people who dislike rust also gravitate towards zig, and that also has some big differences. maybe it's a hate towards mozilla? when i talk to people who hate rust they don't articulate themselves well, so i have to speculate and i get nowhere. one thing i do hear about rust a lot is that it's ugly, but I don't really get that. i can't personally fathom disdaining to use a tool simply because of looks, and i also don't personally think rust is ugly.
I think a bunch of C programmers hate rust passionately because they always looked down their noses at principled languages for being slow.
Now a principled language is beating them on both speed and safety and it's as if the jocks lost a baseball game to the nerds who studied dynamics of solids and cut a series of little slots in their bats so that every time they hit the ball it went out of the park.
So much hate for the clever win over the brute force.
Rust is a tiny bit slower in benchmarks with similar implementations, since it has a few more runtime checks, but the difference is minor.
All depends what your trade offs are. "Milliseconds of run time versus months of debugging." I know one team that were died in the wool C programmers but their baby had one too many security issues and their CTO said they had to reimplement it all in rust. One of them resigned but the others spent ages on it. They hated the borrow checker with a passion, almost as much as they hated the CTO, but after a bit they admitted it had some benefits and in the end they have a love/hate relationship with it. They hate the process still, but they love the result. The Milliseconds vs months quote is from my friend on that team. He said one subsystem had a seriously massive speed boost because they turned off the logging they used to do to recover from some infrequent intermittent bug that simply doesn't happen any more. They're proud of what they did.
Yes, it's true and a common trope that you can save development or rather debugging time with Rust, since it guides you in a safer direction.
For me, it's all about the maintenance now. If it encourages you to write messy code, you will come to loathe your codebase. If it gives you clean, easy to navigate code you will love it more and more.
When I was a young programmer I couldn't abide any boilerplate at all and loved clever magic that made it disappear. Now I don't mind a bit of boilerplate and hate non-obvious machinery.
When I was young I bought the promise that object oriented programming would solve the software complexity problem, but now I think that at best it's neutral and sometimes it makes it worse.
Correct me if I'm wrong because I never used Zig before, but I believe people like it because of the transparency in what the code is doing, like there's no hidden functionality. Where as Rust definitely does do that.
It's like the people complaining about SJWs and cancel culture. Sure, some people are annoying and use these things to harass others, but the vast majority are just normal people who care about certain things. But people on the other side, when they can't provide a good argument against them, start to vilify the people themselves. It's similar to how right wingers cry about decorum when they're more likely to vote for rapists.
I must admit that I had given into this anti-SJW hate at some point in my late teens, but I luckily realized how I was acting like a little bitch, hating on people I don't even know just because they're passionate about equality. The funny thing was, I still believed in their causes, but was pretty much brainwashed into believing that they're hurting the cause by being vocal. It's weird how dumb we often are.
Try suggesting people try out a garbage collected language and see how the crabs come to feast. :P