Literally hates on Rust for the whole article except the final summary.

It seems pretty clear from the article as a whole.

Can you give some examples? C/C++ devs seem to be very upset about rust content. Where all these annoying articles claiming we should rewrite everything in rust? They must be all over the place given how much C/C++ devs are upset. But I don't think I've read any?

There was that article from the android team about how rust improved their development workflow[1]. Is that what you're talking about? Was that article emotionally upsetting? Do you wish it wasn't written? What in particular is upsetting? Do you want people to stop writing technical articles to protect your feelings?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45918616

I haven’t seen a positive Rust article hit HN in over a year. Seems the zeitgeist has turned against it. All it took was the US government giving the thumbs up I guess.

At least the Rust evangelist build shit.

A couple years ago I implemented a btree (technically order statistic tree) in a couple thousand lines of unsafe rust for a project. I wrote it more or less how I'd do it in C. Each internal node and leaf node was a separate heap allocation and internal nodes had an array of child pointers. It was surprisingly hard to program up. And complicated!

In my opinion, unsafe rust code is worse to use than C because rust is missing the arrow operator. And rust still requires strict aliasing to be followed even in unsafe code. This makes complex unsafe code very hard to implement correctly. Like, it’s easy for something to look right and work correctly but for MIR to still find subtle issues.

Eventually I rewrote my btree on top of Vecs. My node & leaf pointers are now array indices. The result? There is no longer any unsafe code. The code has become significantly simpler and it now runs ~10% faster than it did before, which is shocking to me. I guess bounds checks are cheaper than memory fragmentation on modern computers.

I have so many thoughts having done that. First, I think this is actually the right way to write rust. Yes, manually keeping track of which array slots are in use is inconvenient. But unsafe & pointers are also quite inconvenient in rust. Programming like this makes use after free bugs possible to write. But it’s still memory safe by rust’s definition. It’s impossible to get arbitrary heap corruption because there are no raw pointers. And the indexes are bounds checked.

I also don’t think the resulting code is any worse than the equivalent C++. Everyone talks about memory safety but IMO rust’s best features are enums, traits, cargo, match expressions and so on. Even when you do a run around the borrow checker, it’s these features which make me keep coming back to rust.

I agree better guidance would be nice, but so many words have been spilled on rust already. Would you find content talking about subtle stuff like this? Sometimes the only way to learn is by trying stuff out.

Zig currently sits in the hype cycle like Rust/Ruby/Lisp/etc once did here. Eventually something will come along and Zig will be in the hate cycle.

In reality none of these things need the religious wars that seem to go back and forth. It's just an incredibly unfortunate and annoying aspect of how programmer-centric communities tend to go.

Unfortunately there are topics that should stop long ago but people still rave about those: ORMs, OOP, Git, JavaScript bloat, Linux vs Windows.

Somehow there are always fresh people who think someone cares or that somehow those are important discussions.