Rust is just a tool

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/260204.html

by JuniperMesos • 5 months ago

170 202 5 months ago

shrubble• 5 months ago

I’m glad that Rust users are willing to accept that other approaches to safety like Ada are also interesting or effective.

In the past I had the impression that some thought that Rust was the first programming language to ever have the concept.

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

Now we just need the Zig ones acknowledging Object Pascal, Modula-2, Ada,.... as well :)

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

All technology is just a tool, unfortunately it turns into religion like behaviours, because it defines with whom we work, what projects we can work on, what CVs get through HR and which ones don't,....

ozim3• 5 months ago

The horror of picking tech working in it 10 or 15 years and then it suddenly becoming obsolete or irrelevant. Is something a lot of people can relate to.

josephg11• 5 months ago

We're a new industry. So long as we keep iterating on our tools, this will continue to happen. Obsolescence is - in this case - an indicator of progress.

k33n• 5 months ago

It’s useful to align groups on underlying philosophies about problem solving and what tooling we will use.

The alternative is way slower and less effective. “Just use whatever language and frameworks you want and solve the problem in a vacuum” would be a nightmare for any team trying to ship.

lioeters3• 5 months ago

religion like behaviours

That phrasing makes me imagine a cultural anthropologist studying the behavior of programmers in the wild, their tool use, rituals, magical worldviews like object-orientation. There's that classic paper about how a language is a "tool for thinking", that it both expands and limits how and what a person can think. It makes sense that it shares characteristics with religion, a conceptual system of interfacing with the world.

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

Well, since you asked for it, :)

https://youtu.be/ocwnns57cYQ?si=GLb9kNEcAQkaM0up

mold_aid• 5 months ago

That phrasing makes me imagine a cultural anthropologist studying the behavior of programmers in the wild

Google scholar is your friend here

josephg11• 5 months ago

Programming Rust does not mean I have to: buy into their marketing hype
give the same smug lectures about "safety"

I'm often confused reading articles like this, which take for granted the existence of some "rust evangelism strike force" which goes after people on the internet for not liking rust enough.

The way people talk, it sounds like there's some insanely effective marketing campaign going on to promote rust everywhere. But I haven't seen it. Certainly not any more than any other technology people get excited about for awhile, like Go. Or docker when that launched.

Where are these comments? Can anyone give some actual links to these sort of comments people say online, which don't get immediately downvoted? The way people talk, these comments must be made in such large volumes that it seems very odd I don't notice them?

maxbond8• 5 months ago

It's way rarer on Hacker News than people alleging an omnipresent Rust Evangelism Task Force is constantly imposing itself on people. I have seen "overly enthusiastic" comments about Rust, but I can count them on one hand. I'm not going to link them because I don't want to dogpile ob people. Note that I read many/most of the Rust threads that make it to the front page.

But I have seen thousands of comments complaining about these supposed evangelists (no exaggeration). Less often and less reliably in the past few years, the meme is petering out. But there's absolutely no comparison of the relative frequency. People complain bitterly about Rust on this forum consistently, actual Rust zealots appear very rarely.

It is simultaneously true that Rust is "just a tool" and that this is a significant fact, and that the people complaining about Rust are the bigger problem in the day to day discourse in Rust related threads on this platform and in the present day.

dcminter4• 5 months ago

Yeah, I keep hearing about this toxic community from people who won't blink twice to use decade-out-of-date critiques of Java :)

procaryote2• 5 months ago

check further down this discussion for immediately downvoted comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191619

Post anything negative about rust, or anything about a severe bug in some non-rust code, for examples of your own

I have nothing against rust, although the learning curve is too steep and development in rust is too slow to be a practical general purpose language for a regular company.

The culture around dependencies also means you pay for your memory safety by increased supply chain risk.

Golang or Java gets you memory safety, faster compilation, easy hiring and have better standard libraries

josephg11• 5 months ago

I completely agree with your criticisms. I've been saying many of the same things about rust for years on HN. But I'm rarely downvoted for saying so.

FWIW, I also really like rust. I personally much prefer it over Go and Java. But those are still very legitimate criticisms.

resonious2• 5 months ago

I think it's an old stereotype. When Rust started gaining popularity, I did see comments like that. Even felt compelled to post them sometimes. But now that we have real production Rust experience, we're a bit more nuanced in our views.

IshKebab5• 5 months ago

I think it's just what happens when something genuinely great comes along. Some people try it and enthuse about it. Sometimes other people who haven't tried it assume that it's just like all the other average things and therefore the only explanation is irrational fanboyism.

We saw the same thing with the iPhone. It was a step change from previous phones. Loads of people were like "it's just Apple fanbois, I'll stick to my N95" without even trying it.

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

Remember Axum or the reflection drama?

mtndew4brkfst• 5 months ago

You're probably thinking of Actix and the unsafe/TechEmpower thing? I've never seen Axum involved in any notable drama.

darkwater• 5 months ago

In this very comments section: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193361

"all others languages are flawed, Rust is the only that stands the scrutiny" sounds pretty evangelist to me.

josephg11• 5 months ago

Sure; there's one or two unbalanced, positive comments about rust in this thread. Does that seem out of balance to you, out of 113 comments?

If there was a post about Go, Kotlin or C#, I bet there'd be a few glowing positive comments about the languages. I'd be surprised if there weren't.

Is that a problem? I don't want to move the goal posts, but this really doesn't seem like the problem its made out to be. I count far more comments complaining about rust evangelists than I see actual rust evangelism. Even in a thread about rust being a good tool.

What gives?

hu36• 5 months ago

It's not marketing. It's just unproductive and incessant.

For example in this PHP post 3 days ago, ofc someone commented about how they ditched PHP and Go for Rust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149752

pdimitar6• 5 months ago

This is a technical forum. People often flex on what they find better / faster / more productive.

I've seen plenty of comments of people giving up on Rust and going for Go or Typescript for their internal company's tooling needs as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

adampunk• 5 months ago

IMO it's mostly people who, after being told that only bad programmers need memory management, don't immediately kiss the feet of the speaker.

pdimitar6• 5 months ago

I started periodically asking the same question and I get 20-25 upvotes and then eat 15 downvotes some hours later. One recent example (if ~75 days is recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291249).

It is a very weird case of aggressors pretending to be victims.

Did I see zealous Rust comments? Sure! 4-5 on HN in the last 5 years maximum. On Reddit it could be 10-15 for the same period but the discourse there is not very civil or informative anyway so I started ignoring them and not thinking them representative.

On HN I see regular Rust hate while claiming that zealots are everywhere... and like you, I just can't see it.

lispisok• 5 months ago

Rust is cool but there is way too much dogma around its memory safety and static typing in general being a panacea. Most errors are not type errors. Two days after Cloudfare's little Rust hiccup that took the internet down for a day I saw people posting about Rust "if it compiles it runs".

antonvs• 5 months ago

Most errors are not type errors.

If you follow good strong typing principles, you can ensure that most errors are type errors. Yaron Minsky’s phrase, “Make illegal states unrepresentable”, captures this. But it doesn’t happen by accident just because you’re using a strongly typed language.

Also, if Cloudflare had run the standard Clippy linter on their Rust code, and taken the results seriously, it would have prevented the issue you referenced. Static checks don’t help if you ignore them.

JuniperMesos• 5 months ago

I actually don't think this is true. I do think that most programming errors are type errors, in the broader sense of one part of a system making one set of assumptions about the properties of some data, that aren't shared by another part of the system; and that would've been caught automatically by sufficiently sophisticated static correctness checking. I do not think that Rust has a maximally sophisticated type system (nor is it trying to), and while this is reasonable for Rust as a project to decide, I do expect that there will be languages in the future that do more complex things with type systems that might supplant Rust in some domains.

The Cloudflare incident was caused by a confluence of factors, of which code written in Rust was only one. I actually think that Rust code worked reasonably well given the other parts of the system that failed - a developer used unwrap() to immediately crash instead of handling an error condition they thought would never happen; when that error condition did happen the Rust program crashed immediately exactly as expected; and if Cloudflare decided that they wanted to ban not handling an error like this in their codebase, it's a pretty easy thing to lint for with automatic tooling.

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

If it helps finally acknowledging basic stuff like bounds checking matters, great, this from a guy that rather use system languages with automatic resource management.

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"

From 1980!

C++26 will finally have hardening on the standard library, something that I could already enjoy in 1990's with Turbo Vision, OWL, MFC, VCL, but was too much to ask for on the standard library apparently, even if compilers kept having each own their approach.

It took governments and companies to start mapping CVEs to money spent fixing them, to finally acknowledge something had to change.

Meanwhile on C land, business as usual regarding Hoare's quote.

msla• 5 months ago

It's interesting how it's Obviously Impossible to write OSes in garbage-collected languages, and this is proven by the fact successful OSes were written in garbage-collected languages back in the Stone Age, or 1980s, whichever. My current laptop has enough RAM to swallow the entire state of a Symbolics workstation (RAM and disk) without noticing, but it's obviously too wimpy to run an OS written in anything other than C.

(Nitpickers' Corner: "Successful" and "the most commercially successful" are, in fact, two different words. Gots all them different letters an' everything. Therefore, Genera not being as profitable as such Sophisticated Top-Of-The-Line Pieces of Professional-Grade Enterprise-Ready software as MS-DOS doesn't mean Genera wasn't successful.)

IshKebab5• 5 months ago

Most errors are not type errors.

With a sufficiently strong type system all errors are type errors! Rust doesn't have that of course, but it does have quite a strong type system so this is a very bold assertion with no evidence.

Rust does have an "if it compiles it works" feel. Nobody means that literally (this should be really obvious). They just mean that once you get it to compile the chance that it works first time is quite high (like 20% maybe?) compared to most other languages where it's more like 1%.

dcminter4• 5 months ago

I don't think your comment deserves the downvotes (upvoted to compensate) but I do think that it's questionable if "Most errors are not type errors" is true.

Rust's culture of pushing things into type checking does eliminate a huge swathe of bugs and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the majority.

The hurdle of negotiating translation between filesystem strings and unicode strings strikes me as a good example of a place where most languages don't protect you from bugs and a strongly typed one does. The downside, of course, is that you have to handle these cases (even if it's to explicitly say "I don't care").

I still create dumbass bugs in Rust, but they are usually simple logical errors that are pretty obvious when debugging.

josephg11• 5 months ago

Rust doesn't eliminate all bugs. But anecdotally, by the time the type checker and borrow checker have humbled me, my programs really do often work the first time I run them. Its quite remarkable.

This isn't a special thing about rust. All languages are on a spectrum of "detect all bugs statically" to "detect all bugs dynamically". Rust programs run correctly "first time" more than javascript, more than typescript. But still less than haskell.

You can still write bugs in rust, obviously. I've written plenty. As you say, so has cloudflare. But strong typing does find a lot of bugs in practice.

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

This industry pretends to be driven by technical considerations, yet, with some exceptions, is mostly driven by fads, folk knowledge and aesthetic choices.

Folk knowledge may, and often is, grounded in reality and real experience, but let us not forget that most heated debates in programming of today are rooted mostly in tribal logic and fad chasing.

Static vs dynamic typing is a chief example. Empirical evidence that static typing makes some real difference in terms of bugs or safety is inconclusive at best. Yet it doesn't prevent some people from literally shaming those that prefer dynamic languages. Same with OOP - for years it was everywhere, now you may have an impression that it is a sin to ever use it. But now, as much as back then, there is no evidence to support claim that using or not using OOP is "one true way".

Now, memory safety is a real concern, and we can confidently say that we have found ways (exemplified in Rust) to prevent whole class of issues, but suddenly we are in the situation that every single bit of code out there is supposed to put memory safety as a chief concern, no matter if we are talking about some high perf web server, missile control logic, simple script solving Lotka-Volterra equations or simple calculator app.

pdimitar6• 5 months ago

suddenly we are in the situation that every single bit of code out there is supposed to put memory safety as a chief concern

I don't know why you are clumping together fanatics with the pragmatic folk who finally pioneered, in practice, the idea that memory safety is objectively valuable. Different groups.

Empirical evidence that static typing makes some real difference in terms of bugs or safety is inconclusive at best

Literally 99.9999% of everything out there is inconclusive. You'll only extremely rarely find something that is objectively 100% true. So this is a disingenuous argument on your part, seemingly used to undermine something that you might not like. As such, it's an unfair discussion technique.

I worked nearly 9 years with Java a lifetime ago. I could not ever see any actual evidence that OOP and global mutability have ever improved any project.

See? This can go both ways.

This industry pretends to be driven by technical considerations, yet, with some exceptions, is mostly driven by fads, folk knowledge and aesthetic choices.

Always has been, and it goes for almost all industries except those that are heavily regulated.

pdimitar6• 5 months ago

Yeah, apparently a certain group on HN will forever repeat this.

As another poster said, no checks in the world will help if programmers ignored them. It's a one-liner lint in Rust. Somebody at Cloudflare figured it's too inconvenient to do.

rvz• 5 months ago

It's just a tool. But to some people, Rust is more like a religion than a tool and they let it define them to the point even the language maintainers disavow them.

At any point, if you provide any conterpoints or fair criticism towards the language objectively, just expect lots of fans to remind you that it is the best programming language ever created and yours is "unsafe" by default.

dijit• 5 months ago

I like Rust, though I’m not zealous about it.

Sometimes when you have a really good tool, you want to share it.

This was the case with Linux for many people over many years.

FWIW I agree that the community has some frustrating elements, and that its a lot of dogma in comments, though I actually think that’s a fringe element.

ozim3• 5 months ago

Sounds like the point of the article is that you can just use the language and keep counterpoints to yourself.

swiftcoder• 5 months ago

At any point, if you provide any conterpoints or fair criticism towards the language objectively, just expect lots of fans to remind you that it is the best programming language ever created and yours is "unsafe" by default.

This is mostly just a disagreement about what the word "unsafe" means in this context?

"safe" and "unsafe" in the sense Rust uses them aren't a moral judgment about a language, it's a specific (and limited in scope) feature of the language, where memory safety is enforced by the compiler.

furryrain• 5 months ago

like every popular crate buy into their marketing hype follow community "best practices"

Yea, I get smug judgement from Rust zealots for not picking the in vogue crates.

I get a lot of help too though.

People are passionate about it. That has good and bad outcomes.

phplovesong• 5 months ago

Rust has nothing new (even the lifetime stuff is copied) really. It just marketed itself really well. It got a huge number of migrants from JS/TS ecosystem, and python, and some from the C(+*) ecosystems.

Its a good language dont get me wrong, but also a huge pita to work with.

zozbot2344• 5 months ago

Rust has nothing new (even the lifetime stuff is copied) really.

Rust has nothing new by academic standards, and this is an explicit goal of the project. (And that's why it has yet to support e.g. Haskell-like higher-kinded types; or dependent types for compile-time programming: the interaction with its low-level featureset is very much an open question.) It's incredibly novel as a production language, of course.

pjerem• 5 months ago

It has nothing new but they did a good job at cherry picking what what nice in other languages.

Which makes it an interesting language to learn actually. I even feel like Rust can even be a superb first language to learn for a new programmer : that’s a journey for sure but it would expose you to most of the modern programming concepts.

AlotOfReading• 5 months ago

Saying it has nothing new seems like an uncharitable take. Yes, it has influences (that rust docs dedicate a page to [0]), but PL theory has such a rich body of literature that you can make a similar claim about virtually any language. It's the whole package that matters, and I don't think there's anything "rust but earlier" to point to there. Certainly isn't Ada.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html

dcminter4• 5 months ago

[Rust is] a good language [...] but also a huge pita to work with

This is practically the elevator pitch of the language :) and I speak as one who likes it a lot!

zamalek• 5 months ago

Rust happens to be an extremely good tool. There are definitely situations where it absolutely sucks. e.g. Zed is a heroic effort, but look at the code and you'll see that we still haven't figured out how to do Rust UIs.

We may disagree on the premise that humans are generally incapable of correct and safe manual memory management, but that's a degree of distrust I hold for myself. You may have never written a memory bug in your life, but I have, and that renders me completely incompetent.

If a project in an unsafe language has ever had a memory bug (I'm looking at you, Bun), the maintainers objectively have a track record of not being capable of manual memory management. You wouldn't put a person who has a track record of crashing busses at the wheel of a school bus.

And Rust isn't the only memory-safe language. You can turn to Java, Go, C#, Type/JavaScript, and whole bunch of others. Rust just so happens to have ocaml tendencies and other things that make it a joy to read and write, so that's definitely preference on my part. One of these days I'll learn ocaml and possibly drop Rust :)

echelon2• 5 months ago

Zed is a heroic effort, but look at the code and you'll see that we still haven't figured out how to do Rust UIs.

Only a handful of apps and frameworks have figured this out. Most of the world moved onto HTML+Javascript plus Electron. Or mobile UI.

Who is using native UI in 2026? GTK and QT don't feel great.

I'm glad Zed is trying. We need more efforts.

giancarlostoro• 5 months ago

I've been experimenting (thanks to Claude Code because it removes the headache drastically for me of Rust nuances, I'm not a Rust expert by any means) with Qt and Rust.

I discovered cxx-qt which is maintained by some Qt maintainers, which are all employed at KDAB. I had no idea KDAB or this project existed. It's been very smooth so far.

I can honestly say the barrier to building a GUI is very low with Claude, must to the dismay of others, but it beats me building an Electron app.

https://github.com/KDAB/cxx-qt

steve1977• 5 months ago

Who is using native UI in 2026?

Swift. Which is similar to Rust in some ways actually.

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

Who is using native UI in 2026? GTK and QT don't feel great.

Game developers, Windows applications in .NET (possibly with some C++/COM modules)

The problem with native UIs is mostly a Year of Linux Desktop problem.

procaryote2• 5 months ago

You may have never written a memory bug in your life, but I have, and that renders me completely incompetent.

This feels overly binary. Memory management bugs is just one class of bugs, and there have been many other bugs leading to security issues or defects.

If you apply the standard "has ever written a bug" → "completely incompetent" you will have to stop using software, and if you think about it most other technology too

Memory safety is a very useful trait for a language though, and as you say provided by a whole bunch of different languages nowadays

IshKebab5• 5 months ago

Memory management bugs is just one class of bugs

It's a particularly bad one though because it always leads to UB, which means you can't say anything about what happens next.

That's why memory bug severity is often "MAY lead to RCE but who knows". At least with non-UB bugs you can reason about them.

In any case, Rust massively helps with logic bugs too. It's not just about memory safety.

endorphine• 5 months ago

I guess parent argues that:

  - humans have a track-record of writing memory bugs

  - memory-safe languages prevent such by construction

Therefore, what's the justification of not using a memory-safe language (as opposed to an unsafe one)?

torginus2• 5 months ago

Even the statement that (100% safe) Rust does not have memory bugs/mutable aliasing is not always true.

It's well known that Rust has difficulty representing graph-like memory structures, and people have taken to using arrays of `Node`-s to represent graphs, where each graph edge represents a pointer to another node.

This both efficient, and fast, but this approach sidesteps the borrow checker.

If you had a method that 2 mutable `Node` references as parameters, the borrow checker would complain if they'd point to the same struct. If you pass 2 ints, it won't.

Likewise, since liveness is tracked by user logic, you can refer to stale, deallocated `Node`-s or ones that haven't been initialized yet.

I've had people argue this is not a true memory bug, since you're not causing 'real' memory faults, but in C, `malloc` is just a function that hands you pointers into chunks of pre-allocated memory space most of the time, when it doesn't have to ask the OS for more.

I know from experience some people see this criticism as an attack on their favourite language and instantly rebuke it.

But I'd like to argue that there's something there, and it bears thinking about how 'memory allocation exisitng outside Rust' and 'memory allocating existing inside Rust' behave differently might be seen as an interesting dicothomy that needs to be resolved and that resolution might improve Rust's (or some successor language's) memory model.

raincole• 5 months ago

If a project in an unsafe language has ever had a memory bug (I'm looking at you, Bun), the maintainers objectively have a track record of not being capable of manual memory management

That's an interesting way to navigate the world. Do you hold this attitude towards other professionals? For example, if a lawyer ever lost a case by misinterpreting a law, they have a track record of not being capable to practice laws and should be disbarred?

There were (and most likely, still are) even memory bugs in Rust standard library[0]. By your logic the standard library maintainers objectively can't handle unsafe blocks.

[0] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2018-1000657

slekker• 5 months ago

Following your analogy, if there is a way for the lawyer to never lose a case due to misinterpreting the law...

dminik3• 5 months ago

It's not really that interesting. For instance, we've seemingly decided that various blue collar workers are incapable of not falling to their deaths and so have come up with OSHA and various other national equivalents. Drivers are incapable of not crashing and so we started including air bags. Woodworkers seemingly can't stop cutting their fingers off using a table saw and so we came up with SawStop.

Ygg211• 5 months ago

Fixed since 1.22.0

You're only proving unsafe Rust is tricky. Even for experienced maintenaners.

Moldoteck5• 5 months ago

Is there a difference between c++ and java/go/etc if you enforce at code review for C++ to use only auto memory management like smart ptrs, containers, etc? I guess the only difference would be c++ can have diamond problem that's solved in a specific way, but that's relatively easy to spot with compilers, but otherwise...

Imo the strong point of rust is compile error if you try to use an obj after move (unlike c++ with undef behavior and I guess it should be the same for java/c#), or that you can't modify a container if you hold a ref/pointer to some of it's elements/range which may cause invalidation in C++ case due to realloc

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

Yes, because code review isn't common, it is at the same level as writing documentation, or unit tests in most companies.

Unless there is some DevOps freedom to at least put something like Sonar or clang tidy on the build pipeline breaking PR that don't play by the rules, and even then you cannot prevent everything via static analysis rules.

ben-schaaf3• 5 months ago

Is there a difference between c++ and java/go/etc if you enforce at code review for C++ to use only auto memory management like smart ptrs, containers, etc?

Smart pointers and containers are nowhere near memory safe, just enforcing their use gets you nowhere. `std::vector::operator[](size_t)` doesn't check bounds, `std::unique_ptr::operator*()` doesn't check null.

Imo the strong point of rust is compile error if you try to use an obj after move (unlike c++ with undef behavior

The state of a value after being moved is defined by the move constructor. It is unspecified by the spec, but it's generally not undefined behavior.

dminik3• 5 months ago

Yes there is. RAII is not a full replacement for GC and you will shoot yourself in the foot if you treat it as such. The design of C++ also includes many unpatchable holes in the standard library which WILL cause errors and UB.

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

Zig would be an interesting contender back in the 1990's between Object Pascal and Modula-2, nowadays we know better.

For me while Go is definitly better than Oberon(-2), and Oberon-07, some of its design decisions are kind of meh, still I will advocate for it in certain contexts, see TinyGo and TamaGo efforts.

As old ML fanboy, you can find such tendencies on plenty of languages not only OCaml. :)

I see Rust as a great way to have made affine types more mainstream, however I rather see the mix of automatic resource management + strong type systmems as a better way forward.

Which is even being acknowledged by Rust's steering group, see Roadmap 2026 proposals.

selfmodruntime2• 5 months ago

I‘ve been writing Rust for half a decade now and I‘m firmly believing that it‘s just not good for UI. Global state and a model that lends itself to inheritance just doesn‘t fit in the language.

Ygg211• 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure the issue isn't Rust but the fact outside Browser UI, every native UI sucks.

And the biggest culprit is Apple by far, followed by Microsoft, followed by Linux lack of consistency.

znkr• 5 months ago

If a project in an unsafe language has ever had a memory bug (I'm looking at you, Bun), the maintainers objectively have a track record of not being capable of manual memory management. You wouldn't put a person who has a track record of crashing busses at the wheel of a school bus.

If you’re serious, you should stop using Rust (which happens to contain an unsafe language): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/44800

g947o3• 5 months ago

Hmm... A bug report from near a decade ago, where the bug was fixed within days. Not sure what your point is. If anything, it shows how much Rust cares about memory safety, because elsewhere it wouldn't be a compiler bug in the first place.

ViewTrick10022• 5 months ago

Just compare the Buns and Deno issue trackers.

Bun is segfaults galore, I’ve stumbled upon them.

In Deno they essentially only come from integrating with C and C++ libraries.

sheepscreek• 5 months ago

Rust happens to be an extremely good tool. There

Sir (or ma’am), you stole literally the line I came to write in the comments!

To anyone new picking up Rust, beware of shortcuts (unwrap() and expect() when used unwisely). They are fine for prototyping but will leave your app brittle, as it will panic whenever things do not go the expected way. So learn early on to handle all pathways in a way that works well for your users.

Also, if you’re looking for a simpler experience (like Rust but less verbose), Swift is phenomenal. It does not have a GC, uses ARC automatically. I spent months building a layer on top of Rust that removed ownership and borrow considerations, only to realize Swift does it already and really well! Swift also has a stable ABI making it great for writing apps with compiled dynamic components such as plugins and extensions. It’s cross platform story is much better today and you can expect similar performance on all OS.

For me personally, this relegates rust for me to single threaded tasks - as I would happily take the 20% performance hit with Swift for the flexibility I get when multithreading. My threads can share mutable references, without fighting with the borrow checker - because it’s just a bad use case for Rust (one it was not designed for). A part of my work is performance critical to that often becomes a bottleneck for me. But shouldn’t be a problem for anyone else using RwLock<Arc<…>>. Anyway - they’re both great languages and for a cli tool or utility, you can’t go wrong with either.

apatheticonion• 5 months ago

you'll see that we still haven't figured out how to do Rust UIs

This is really a symptom of the horrendous desktop GUI API landscape. I'd argue that Rust is syntactically actually very well suited to writing GUI applications - and better than most given the fearless concurrency you get with it.

MacOS is committed to making sure only developers are using Mac hardware and Apple languages to write GUIs - they feel deliberately combative to the prospect of cross platform applications

Windows? How do you even make a Windows GUI these days? Win32? WinUI? Winforms? The examples on the Microsoft website don't even compile when when using the supported languages.

Linux is pretty okay, if it weren't for Linux GUI programming being a mess of DEs. GTK-rs and QT are standard - but you'll never have something that looks consistent on every environment.

The only hope is WASM, but the standards body is busy figuring out how to make web assembly replace docker containers or something. It's barely usable and I've been dying to rewrite all my web applications in Rust.

This is why Electron is everywhere, it's the best we can do without going insane.

maxbond8• 5 months ago

1000x yes. Rust is not a One True Language, there exists no One True Language. Rust made some improvements over previous languages (many of which were ported over from previous languages that demonstrated the value but weren't break out successes) and serendipitously those improvements added up to something that was really significant and unlocked interesting and useful capabilities. I'm never going back to how my workflows were before I learned Rust (though I still write in other languages everyday).

But there will be other languages in the future that will continue to deliver small improvements until one day they result in another phase change. The honeymoon with Rust will be over and it will start feeling more antiquated.

C, Python, Java, are just a couple random languages that were/are similarly influential. (C is of course orders of magnitude more influential, the only language more influential is probably COBOL?)

esperent• 5 months ago

But there will be other languages in the future that will continue to deliver small improvements until one day they result in another phase change

I agree, and I'm interested to see what it is in the age of LLMs or similar future tools. I suspect a future phase change might be towards disregarding how easy it is for humans to work with the code and instead focus on provability, testing, perhaps combined with token efficiency.

Maybe Lean combined with Rust shrunk down to something that is very compiler friendly. Imagine if you could specify what you need in high level language and instead of getting back "vibe code", you get back proven correct code, because that's the only kind of code that will successfully compile.

echelon2• 5 months ago

If your LLM can output 10-100x the LOC output, and it's equally good at all languages, and you're not bound to an existing language choice or ecosystem, why not choose Rust?

Rust code will be faster, safer, and easier to ameliorate bugs in.

Rust seems like the best language to serialize business logic to now that LLMs are so good at it.

If the LLM makes a mistake in Javascript or Python, you literally won't know until runtime. With Rust, you'll know immediately and have really good compiler recommendations for fixes.

I think Rust is the best LLM language. I am somewhat biased: I've written Rust code for ten years, and I'm having a blast with Claude Code writing it for me instead now. But I've also used so many other tools and languages - enough to say that Rust has some unique advantages here. And also that Claude does a fantastic job emitting Rust.

LLMs emitting Python feels like building with clay. LLMs emitting Rust feels like building well-engineered steel skyscrapers.

maxbond8• 5 months ago

I do choose Rust. For now. I write Rust everyday. I'm generating Rust at this moment.

But when I learn a better language I will adopt it.

resonious2• 5 months ago

I'm also having a really good time having LLMs write code in Rust. In Typescript they tend to abuse `any` or just cast stuff around, bypassing the type system at every corner. In Rust they seem to take compiler errors to heart and things tend to work well.

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

LLMs emitting Rust feels like building well-engineered steel skyscrapers

Oh the irony.

Good thing that real engineers cannot build their skyscrapes with LLMs.

zozbot2344• 5 months ago

But there will be other languages in the future that will continue to deliver small improvements until one day they result in another phase change. The honeymoon with Rust will be over and it will start feeling more antiquated.

That language may well be Rust itself, especially if they manage to figure out the "how to deprecate standard library features across language editions and allow reuse of their idiomatic syntax?" problem.

maxbond8• 5 months ago

Totally true. Similarly I think a C revival is more likely than people might think because of Fil-C, improvements to the language standard, and maybe hardware improvements like CHERI. Eg, maybe there will be a new generation of Fil-C like compilers, maybe C will get a lot easier, and maybe that will cause C to displace Python as the preffered pedagogical "first language" (which would really be reprising it's role). Not because it's easier than Python but because it's easy enough and we start emphasizing low-level optimization more because AI is eating all of our compute. Stranger things have happened.

hu36• 5 months ago

I think Rust has a big flaw to overcome in the age of LLMs: slow compilation.

If they can't fix this, a language with similar guarantees, even syntax, but fast compilation is bound to succeed in niches where Rust is desireable.

Iteration speed is a big bottleneck in agentic workflows. Well, any workflow.

xlii2• 5 months ago

Sir/Madam/Sovereign... did you hear about Prolog? ;)

maxbond8• 5 months ago

This isn't the first time someone has said that to me, so I really ought to make time to learn it.

torginus2• 5 months ago

The weird thing about this is many core Rust people agree that Rust is not the best language that could possibly ever be, even evaluated by the core principles of Rust (that is: no UB, no mutable aliasing, no memory bugs).

And if we move outside of Rust's memory model, some people have raised issues with the inconsistent syntax, and the module-based compilation model which makes compilers inherently slow, as you have to parse the whole module every time.

So there's room for improvement, and people are already working on putting ideas into practice, and some of these people who came from the Rust ecosystem itself.

And if you happen to disagree with Rust's core goals (or just place less emphasis on them), then it's obviously not the perfect language.

tmtvl• 5 months ago

(C is of course orders of magnitude more influential, the only language more influential is probably COBOL?)

Lisp. Which coincidentally solved memory management over a decade before C was created.

I also think ALGOL was more influential than COBOL, but measuring influence can be tricky.

burakemir• 5 months ago

A programming language is a medium to communicate programs to something that can execute them. That isn't exactly the same thing as a tool. A tool in my book is a metaphor for a program that helps achieve some well-defined task. Even if we ignore this difference, we would still want to talk about tool safety.

In my experience there is a C++ mob that hates Rust. These are the people who declare statement of facts as ideology. No good faith dialogue is possible.

There are also competent C++ programmers who misunderstand or don't know how static checking works.

I also witness normal people who are completely surprised by a statement like "C++ is all unsafe" and find that too strong. Using the word "safe" with a technical meaning throws normal people off because, sadly, not everyone who writes code is an academic PL researcher.

"Safe", in Rust and much PL research, means "statically checked by the compiler to be free of UB". If you are pedantic, you need to add "... under the assumption that the programmer checked all conditions for the code that is marked `unsafe`" for Rust. That is all there is to it. Scientific definition.

C++ in its current form is full of gross design mistakes, many of which could be corrected at the price of breaking backwards compatibility. Mistakes happen, aldo to world leading PL researcher (the ML language and polymorphic references) which is why the field embraced mechanically checked proofs. The difference is the willingness to address mistakes.

Academics use "safe" in exactly the meaning the Rust community uses. If you don't understand this, go and educate yourself. Academics need to communicate effectively which leads to technical meanings for everyday words or made up words and jargon.

Maybe a statically checked safe low-level language is marketing genius. It is also a technical breakthrough building on decades of academic research, and took a lot of effort.

Bjarne and friends chose a different direction. Safety was not a design goal originally but doubling down on this direction means that C++ is not going to improve. These are all facts.

Backwards compatibility is a constraint. Constraints don't give anyone license to stop people who don't have those constraints.

We don't have to feel any moral obligation to use statically checked languages for programs. But claiming that static checking does not make a difference is ignorant, and attaching value to one's ignorance certainly seems like an indicator for ideology and delusion.

michaelmure• 5 months ago

Any recommandation for a quality non-toy rust codebase to study?

maxbond8• 5 months ago

Two arbitrary picks:

https://crates.io/crates/serde

https://crates.io/crates/regex

Anything covered by Gjengset's "decrusted" series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbS7AVVErFirH9armw8yXlE6...

Sort of on the border between toy and not-toy; Gjengset implements a concurrent hash map: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbS7AVVErFj824-6QgnK_Za1... [17hr recorded over 3 streams]

josephg11• 5 months ago

The rust standard library is excellent. Start more or less anywhere, and click "view source". Or open up the source code files on github.

There's often a lot more comments than code, which is kind of annoying. But it really is the best way to learn how a lot of good rust is written.

Vec is a good read: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/vec/mod.rs.html

Here's the lovely slice::binary_search_by: https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/slice/mod.rs.html#2967-29...

anon-3988• 5 months ago

Rust is just a tool. A decent tool that I think can be made better (by removing stuff and stop adding more stuff to the surface syntax). So I am down to criticize Rust.

However, I also don't understand how people don't see the usefulness of what Rust put to the mainstream: algebraic data types, sum types, traits, etc.

I also get super annoyed when people think Rust is only chosen for "safety". Says frustrating things like "so I can just use unsafe", because no you don't and if you do I would reject your changes immediately.

Honestly, in general, I am just annoyed when people don't use the right tool for the right job. And attempts to fix the tool with more bespoke stuff on top it.

HippoBaro• 5 months ago

Says frustrating things like "so I can just use unsafe", because no you don't and if you do I would reject your changes immediately.

This is the kind of hostility (which is frankly toxic) that’s become associated with parts of the Rust community, and has fairly or not, driven away many talented people over time.

iknowstuff2• 5 months ago

There is no hostility on display there lol just an entirely reasonable code quality standard

aldanor• 5 months ago

Yes. To me personally, Rust and both its restrictions and features (ie no OOP and prevalence of sum types and hence other goodies) makes approaching the implementation of big problems differently; eventually the experience with Rust also changes (to some extent) the way you write and structure the code in other languages. One might argue that Rust is not unique here and this would also apply to languages like ocaml etc - sure, perhaps; but I can't write in any of those languages at work on daily basis since they don't fit performance-wise or for many other reasons.

qsera2• 5 months ago

Rust is boaring! I ll never use Rust for something I build for fun.

It will be a shame if new programmers will stay away from C because of all the scaremongering regarding the consequences of not freeing some memory (in some toy, pet project) in their own computers.

simonask• 5 months ago

You seem to believe that Rust prevents memory leaks. It does not, and that's not what "memory safety" means.

sheept• 5 months ago

Yes, Rust does not guarantee that it'll prevent memory leaks. But the design of the language does make it harder for you (and your collaborators/dependencies) to accidentally leak memory compared to, say, C++.

up2isomorphism• 5 months ago

Rust is a very very ugly language, this is made worse when it is shamelessly promoted by bunch of persistent people with bad tastes.

Also trying to fight runtime behavior with compile time constraints cannot be a universal treatment. Trying to enforce OOP is one of such examples, and it already failed .

oytis• 5 months ago

We need more courageous people like him.

fmajid• 5 months ago

Overly enthusiastic Rust evangelists can be annoying, but nowhere as much as C++ or C advocates defensively claiming memory safety isn't a big deal, and they are going to have it in the next version of the language anyway.

I find my experience with Erlang has helped with the (considerable) learning curve for Rust, but I still prefer Go for most use-cases.

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

claiming memory safety isn't a big deal

There are contexts where it is, there are contexts where it is not.

But suddenly everyone out there is dealing only with those context where it is.

ysleepy• 5 months ago

Rust does not have the best tooling by far imo.

The IDE capabilities are not nearly as advanced as they are for Java for example.

Compared to C/C++ or dynamically typed languages, sure.

I love that cargo unifies the ecosystem, no quabble over one shitty build tool over another.

I feel like the IDE story still has a long way to go.

pjmlp22• 5 months ago

Not even C/C++, only if vim and emacs are the only experience one has ever had.

See Visual C++ (with hot code reloading, incremental linking, AI integration, on the fly analysis), QtCreator, Clion (comparable with VS in many options), C++ Builder (with its RAD capabilities),....

Cargo is great as long as it is only Rust code and there is little need to interop with platform SDKs, then it is build.rs fun.

g947o3• 5 months ago

Java has over 3 decades of history, during which many IDEs were developed just for Java, and the ecosystem evolved over that long period. Rust is still way too young.

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

It doesn't have the same kind of high quality tooling, period. People on the internet are not going around saying "look at Rust, such a young language but already has such awesome tooling like cargo, can't wait to see what we are going to have in few years from now". They just simply claim that Rust tooling is superior to anything else.

Because only thing they know are CLI-based workflows for cavemen.

goku123• 5 months ago

I'm curious about the exact exchange that prompted the author to say this.

refuse to admit there are alternatives to RAII

I'm even more curious about this. Can the author or anybody else explain what this means specifically? Can anybody list those alternatives other than GC and RC?

PS: Computer Science isn't exactly my primary professional competence.

cwood-sdf• 5 months ago

Batching/arenas can get you very far. If you adopt the zig/c object model as “things that have data” most destructors become useless. Resource management also can be accomplished at the batch level (eg you can free a bunch of fd’s all at once with a management layer rather than having each File object implicitly manage its own fd). For memory management, i believe proper use of arenas and batching tends to be faster than each object managing its own memory but idrk tbh. What the author is saying is that you dont have to have raii, you can use approaches like the one i described and they can still be pretty safe if you know what youre doing, but rust’s model basically prevents this if youre using rust idiomatically

markisus2• 5 months ago

Yeah if your program has a natural notion of a "frame" (eg most video games), you can do memory management by simply incrementing an integer (bump allocation). At the end of your frame, you reset the integer to zero. You can't really get any faster than that.

An additional benefit of this style of allocation over malloc/free is that you can get a lot of the same type of objects contiguous in memory so that iteration over them is a lot faster because there are fewer cache misses.

goku123• 5 months ago

I forgot about the arena approach. So, which language is the best to try it out? How does Zig look? I have been putting off my attempts to learn it, due to the fact that it's not stable yet. Perhaps it's time to give it another go?

xlii2• 5 months ago

I agree with this (short and sweet) piece. I'm Rust user but the crab-hype turned me off for the long time.

Personally I'd prefer writing Haskell but there are sharp edges I can't overlook (like constantly breaking LSP of 11/10 difficulty on producing distributable binaries).

I cringe every time I spit out 50 lines of boilerplate just to get C done Rust, but it's best tool I found that's good enough in many scopes.

alecco2• 5 months ago

Rust is an amazing tool that sadly has the most toxic self-righteous community in PL. Like doxxing that kid for daring to post he refactored his pet project from Rust to Go.

speed_spread5• 5 months ago

Every community has these assholes. In my experience, the Rust user base is nothing but polite, understanding and pragmatic. There's no smugness, explicit or implied. The Rust lore is just a joke that's getting less funny every day someone takes it seriously.

wolvesechoes6• 5 months ago

Yet, almost every Rust thread here serves as a evidence that your experience doesn't reflect reality.

ch_123• 5 months ago

I feel like it's far easier to find more zealously anti-Rust people than zealously pro-Rust people - hating Rust has almost turned into a meme.

ameixaseca• 5 months ago

Rust (...) has the most toxic self-righteous community in PL.

You never dealt with C programmers, did you?

randomint64• 5 months ago

Sherlock Holmes liked to say "When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

The same is true for programming languages. When you have eliminated all the others for their fatal flaws, only Rust remains, so it's not "just a tool", it's the best tool (or less worse, depending on how you like the syntax).

You can read more about the technical reasons here: https://kerkour.com/rust-software-engineering-reliability

qsera2• 5 months ago

hah hah hah!

hu36• 5 months ago

Luckily software development is not a static crime to be solved.

It's an evergreen field to be researched forever. With languages coming and going. ;)

squirrellous• 5 months ago

This is why I get turned off hearing about Rust (and I use it from time to time). You can say Rust is good without saying other languages are bad.

kshri24• 5 months ago

My only gripe with Rust is Rust-Analyzer taking up so much of my system's resources. And I know it is not really fixable which is a bummer.

BoingBoomTschak• 5 months ago

"$LANG is just a tool" has never been right. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (or the blub lang analogy - and not the smug part - for programmers) is still true to this day.

tl;dr: Just a tool, but "we shape our tools and then our tools shape us".

dcminter4• 5 months ago

While these are all reasonable points, there is a distinction between criticising people for using ${lang} (bad) and criticising the language (neutral).

Some people get their egoes attached to their choices (for or against Rust).

Also there's a time and a place for all criticism. If the conversation is not fundamentally about language choice then it's very irritating to have it brought up.

ragall• 5 months ago

Everyone's getting the wrong metaphor. Languages are raw material, not tools.

jurschreuder• 5 months ago

I don't think Rust/PHP are all that much more safe than Zig/C++.

80% of memory safety bugs in C++ are just basically "array out of bounds", for which you don't need a memory checker at all just array bounds checks which LLVM has enabled by default for Rust but you can also use it for C++.

70% of vulns in C++ are memory related but only ~10% of those would be caught by borrow checking. Most are already caught by forcing object initialisation and array bounds checking. Only use-after-free is caught by either borrow checking OR OTHER TOOLS like ARM has 4 bits in addresses that can encode if the memory location has not been pulled from under you.

So aaaaall this trouble if the borrow checker to have in some cases max 10% fewer vulnos.

I'm not going to switch to Rust/PHP just for that little memory safety bonus.

willx86• 5 months ago

As someone who has only used zig a little

I've has more core dumps/seg faults than any other language I've ever used.

Skill issue? Yes, 100℅, it's definitely due to my lack of skill in the language

The only time I've ever made a rust program seg fault is when using nightly macros/"features" and being on stable, leading to rustc crashing with a nice error and then I change to nightly

and that was caught at compile time...

Skill is a huge factor in safety

"70% of vulns are..." Yes, production code written at huge companies by experts... If experts are making those mistakes, that says a lot about it IMO

That being said, I'm not a "one language for all", they have their place, embedded rust is hilarious as it's essentially a requirement to have unsafe blocks in your initialisation

Anyway rant over

nesarkvechnep• 5 months ago

We've had memory-safe languages for 50 years, don't act like Rust is the first one.

eviks• 5 months ago

and they may prefer different tools to us. We would do well to accept this.

Why is it better to accept harm from bad tools, especially since we are the ones harmed by those preferences?

MeanEYE• 5 months ago

Good for systems programming? Perhaps. But to install all the dependencies you need so many crates you literally can install another operating system.

spwa4• 5 months ago

Next you're going to say the choice of vim or emacs is just about editing text.

BURN THE HERETIC!

Rust is just a tool

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