The meme of the Rust Evangalism Strikeforce exists for a reason - because a person can't say anything remotely uncomplementary about Rust without getting dogpiled and downvoted into oblivion.
The Rust community has proven itself, outside of the Rust specific forums, to be exceptionally elitist.
And, as shown in a sibling thread, the founders of Rust are right there on the dogpile attacking the character and dissecting the comments of any dissenters.
I've come to the conclusion that many people just project whatever they want onto these kinds of conversations, positive and negative.
For example, in my comment, I very much said "made it seem" and suggested that maybe people were misunderstanding the poster, not attacking their character.
Many people post many negative things about Rust, including those who are its most fervent advocates. But the gray areas mean there's places where people can post things and some people say "ugh any criticism is downvoted" and others can say "wow this is an absolutely off-topic, baseless criticism" and both will walk away feeling right.
I appreciate your comments here for multiple reasons and will not forget them. Thanks for taking the time to talk, it really sets a great example, too.
Polite or not, using "soft" words or not, attacking the character of someone – "[you're not] interested in having a real discussion", "[you only want] a specific kind of description from a specific kind of person" – does Rust, and its community, absolutely no favors.
> Many people post many negative things about Rust
And I have no doubt that you'll continue to be there, "gently" correcting them.
This is exactly what I mean. I don't see how saying "hey this statement came across a little insulting and that's probably why people got a bit aggro" is attacking someone's character. There's nothing to do with someone's character in there, at all.
I myself post negative things about Rust, including in this thread. Heck in the last week I've told the story about a team I was on not choosing Rust and how I thought that was a good decision in like, three different threads between here and Reddit.
I doubt we will ever agree though, so I'll leave it at that.
Rust has a lot of deficiencies, like any programming language, but in general what I've seen is that "the community" believes the ownership model/lifetimes and "unsafe" keyword effectively makes it flawless. I think it's dangerous, to be honest, and the community in this regard is not very good--it's filled with people who hype the power of the language well beyond its limits.
I've basically had nothing but downvotes from the Rust community because any time I point something out about my thoughts on the language, I'm wrong and can't have those thoughts.
Some one here in a separate thread said, "I don't understand your hate," and I'm like, what hate? It's a programming language. I don't hate it, I just don't yet find a reason to use it, but maybe I'm missing something really big.
It's not really welcoming at all in my opinion. It carries all of the familiar facets of being a hyped product that people love, and if you question it you're not only wrong, you should be torn down because of your opinion.
People are downvoting you because you're writing things that are:
- factually wrong (revealing you don't know very basic info about Rust)
- anecdotal
- inflammatory (as you yourself admit when you say your comments were "crude")
It's not that people are being fanboys. I see lots of non-downvoted comments about not wanting to use Rust. Look at any HN thread about Zig, and you'll see a ton of non-grey comments that say Zig is better or that modern C/C++ don't need replacing.
If you want to sincerely debate Rust, you should learn the basics (for example, understanding how it's intended to reuse the C ecosystem, not "throw it away"); stop insulting other people in the thread (e.g. saying that using Rust is "playing with toys"); and acknowledging that it's not intended to appeal to anyone who thinks they're able to perfectly manage memory in C/C++ without any mistakes.
On that last point: no one with a lot of experience in C/C++ thinks it's possible to manage memory in those languages without dangerous bugs, and increasingly people think adopting a new language (Rust) is a good trade-off for avoiding whole classes of memory bugs.
The thing is that your tone doesn't seem to come across a genuinely interested. It seems like you're just throwing uninformed opinions at people without leaving an opening for discussion.
For example, you talk about not wanting to throw away the C ecosystem. Instead, you could say, "What about all the great C libraries that we're never going to rewrite in Rust? Are Rust users throwing all that work away?"
And then someone would correctly inform you that the Rust community doesn't want to throw all that work away and has spent a ton of time on interop.
I'm not trying really hard to argue facts or even talking about performance numbers or anything of the sort. There are people who really, really love Rust, and I'd love to better understand how some developers arrived at their opinions of the software.
If there's a killer reason outside of memory safety and ownership, like compiler speed or something, I'd love to hear more about it from first hand accounts rather than someone's blog article about how great Rust is... and oh by the way we sell some product written in Rust, check it out! You know?
I hear what you're saying in this sub-thread. I will say that your "toy" comment didn't make it seem like you were interested in having a real discussion, but mostly just throwing shade, as they say. The whole comment has this vague undertone of "I am above this whole thing." This is probably why you're running into some difficulty. There's not just the crew that loves Rust, but also a very, very dedicated set of Rust haters, and it's really easy to bucket someone, incorrectly, into one or the other, based on initial impression.
One interesting thing in this comment, and why I chose to respond to it though, is it seems like what you want isn't just a description, but a specific kind of description from a specific kind of person. That is, it has to be "first-hand" but also not from someone who "sell[s] some product written in Rust." How can you get first-hand knowledge without building something? How can you demonstrate that that knowledge is legitimate without also letting people know that you have done that work? It seems impossible to me.
Yeah, sorry about that Steve. That was crass. I appreciate you sharing some thoughts here.
With respect to people's experiences, there are a lot more developers than developer/salesmen. The latter are more passionate by necessity, so I think there's a healthy band of feedback from those consuming the language maybe for work or hobby projects.
It's cool! Commenting on the internet is hard! And not everyone will like Rust, and that's super okay. You may also end up trying it and deciding you don't like it. That is 100% fine, no matter what upvotes or downvotes say.
You're side stepping what I said. The point is people will downvote false facts, but rarely downvote opinions that do not have an underpinning of false facts.
Furthermore, you're lying. You've gotten tons of responses here as to why some people use Rust or like Rust, yet you then continue to spout that you want what you've already have gotten.
The communities of statically typed programming languages were especially elitist and gatekeeping.
The Rust community is welcoming.