> 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?

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.

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.

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.

Remember Axum or the reflection drama?

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

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.