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Could someone fill me in on the Rust situation? (piefed.blahaj.zone)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linuxfurs@pawb.social
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I heard a PeerTuber I follow talk about controversy around "Rust" as a dangerous cult or something, but that she thinks people should put aside their "petty grievances" and focus more on what good the project will do for Linux. I'm out of the loop, but I think Rust is a programming language, right? Anyone know what this whole thing about a cult is? I want to be filled in on it, because it seems important.

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[–] 4 points 8 months ago (7 children)

I'm not sure about a full-on cult, but the people who push Rust push Rust REALLY, REALLY HARD. And they frame any opposition as "you just need to GET WITH THE TIMES!!!".

Much like the Wayland people, and the systemd people.

Personally, that massively turns me off. Especially because when I tried rust, it tried to force us to use snake_case instead of camelCase in our OWN CODE, throwing up "style warnings". That's not okay.

It feels like they want to end style diversity, programming language diversity, want everything to be done Their Way because it's Just Better and how dare people disagree.

(Python has similar "having your own style is frowned upon" culture problems, I think, but they don't really do the same "we need to wipe out other programming languages!!" shit.)

So I'm against Rust myself, not for technical reasons, but because of that.

-- Frost

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    The remark about style warnings is really alien to me. Style warnings are something I'm accustomed to when programming in nearly any language. I can't remember the last time I used a language where whatever IDE I happened to be using didn't have style warnings. And I've never had trouble adapting. "Oh right, C# convention is PascalCase methods. Oh, Java is camelCase". In fact I've been jumping between a C# project and a Java project recently, and I haven't been finding it difficult. Rustc having some linter-type warnings built in is a bit novel I guess, but really not a fundamentally different experience. It's really not any more difficult to disable those warnings for a Rust project than for a C# project. I don't think I can understand calling that "not okay".

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    There's a difference between "adding a style checker yourself" (or the project owners doing it, if it's not your project) and "having a style checker built into the core tools that yells at you unless you either conform, or turn it off in every single project you write".

    Sure, C# convention for the standard APIs and whatnot may be PascalCase, Java camelCase, and whatever. But that doesn't mean that Everyone Must Follow The Standard Convention. That way lies Python and frankly, Python's "there is One Correct Way to do everything" culture really turns me off.

    But even Python doesn't do this. Neither does Java. Yeah your IDE might, but that's a weird IDE feature then. And we can just use a different IDE. You can't just a) use a different compiler and b) tell everyone who's interested in your project to use the different compiler or ignore the warnings, they're spurious trust me bro.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    You can disable specific warnings as a project setting, not just with rustc/cargo but with every build toolchain I've used in the last ~10 years. It's very common for me to find a project with at least one specific warning disabled. That really isn't a "trust me bro" -- people can look at the project, see which warnings are disabled, and decide for themselves if that is reasonable.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Like, Rust's style checker nonsense is "remind me later" culture. Trying to wear you down by making you say "no, stop trying to get me to use your style instead of mine" in every. single. project until you break down and stop caring.

    That's why it's not okay.

    (inb4 "but what about other warnings!": those are actual problems with the code, or stuff that might turn into problems. "Having a different coding style than the language authors' personal decree" just isn't.)

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Right, I see what you mean. That's just a weird perspective to have. I know right now Kdenlive is pretty much the only FLOSS video editor, but if there were other comparable ones, imagine if I tore you to pieces over your choice to use the other one? For no reason? Damn.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Yeah! Exactly.

    (There are plenty of other video editors, by the way! We've only used Kdenlive, but have heard of Shotcut and... Open..something-or-other? But yeah, there's more.)

    The Rust people often push the idea that "Rust is the only memory-safe language" (or at least imply it, "all projects should be written in Rust for memory safety!"), completely ignoring that like... MOST languages are memory-safe these days. Yeah, that doesn't apply as much in the low-level space C sits in, and C is the opposite of a memory-safe language (it's basically "memory is just a bunch of bytes, do whatever you want, just be careful"), but still.

    (C does have advantages, though. It's been around forever, the way C programs are built is kinda foundational to how programs are built in general on Unix, and basically every language that has cross-language interoperability does it with C, so libraries in C can work with nearly everything. It's also relatively simple to implement (compared to other languages), which is great if you're writing a compiler for fun or for a new architecture. I kinda like C! Absolutely abysmal string handling though. But for that there's Perl. Which, is memory-safe. :3)

    -- Frost

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