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WarmWashtoday at 2:48 PM3 repliesview on HN

Can someone explain to my non-programmer self what the deal is with Rust?

Even not being in the tech space, I have long picked up on this quasi-religous aura around it.


Replies

alexaholictoday at 3:29 PM

Rust is a tool that allows one to build cars for humans to drive, in order to avoid certain accidents. If you try to put your dog in the driver’s seat of a Rust-powered car, Rust will stop you and ask you to produce proof that the dog is a qualified human driver.

The world is a pretty big place, so of course there are people who sometimes put their dog in the driver’s seat. Sometimes by accident, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes because they think it’s mighty fun. Since Rust is strict about who or what gets to drive the car, these people build their cars using other languages.

Some Rust-heads, however, are pretty adamant that cars are to be driven by qualified humans only, and therefore keep nagging everyone about how all cars should be built with Rust.

gosub100today at 3:55 PM

before rust, if you wanted to use a "fast" programming language you had to use C or C++, which are fraught with sharp edges. Rust gives you all the performance benefits of a compiled language, with barely any sharp edges.

llm_nerdtoday at 3:26 PM

Using python for a purpose like this is extremely strange -- it clearly is just technology debt they've been carrying around from a silly decision over a decade ago -- so someone mentioned a contemporary, more acceptable alternative. I don't really see why this threatens some people, much less the incredibly stupid "religious" nonsense.

Rust has lots of inertia behind it, a fantastic core library, fantastic concurrency and scalability and excellent LLM support. If someone were greenfield building a service like this today, instead of being bound by poor decisions in the past, had infinite knowledge of every toolset and language and option, there is a very good chance they would settle on Rust. They might not, but it's definitely a finalist. So not remotely surprising someone would mention it.

That this caused someone to flip out is hilarious though.

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