alt Hacker NewsYour argument about stagnation is good, but "capable engineers can pick up any language" is not without costs for the involved developers in terms of time spent learning paradigms, features, bugs, gotchas (like temporary lifetime gotchas in Rust encouraged by the constraints of the borrow checker, still a widespread issue in 2026 https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-rust-match-made-in-hell ), APIs, libraries, ecosystem, build systems, etc.
They would also have to figure out how to approach distribution, organization, linking, etc.
Replies
> still a widespread issue in 2026
Is it "widespread"? The article you link is from 2022 and none of the discussion I saw on said article gave me the impression that it was particularly common issue back then, let alone now.
Would you agree that one should optimize for the project / software, rather that optimize for any individual programmer on it?
Yup it's not without cost. But paying the cost short-term can yield benefits for the long-term.
I'm not defending Rust as the specific here though, I'm discussing it a bit more abstractly in regards to "moving from tech A to tech B". I've only dabbled with Rust, but from what I can tell it _should_ improve overall quality of codebases over time by reducing some of the more painful footguns of C.