You'll notice the top rated comment, & majority of comments, agrees with their decision to switch to C++. Yet we'll persist that Rust is an elitist community..
> You'll notice the top rated comment, & majority of comments, agrees with their decision to switch to C++. Yet we'll persist that Rust is an elitist community.
Having read those comments, many of them can be best characterized as politely dismissive, e.g. from the top rated comment "If the author is more comfortable writing this code in C++ it makes sense to use it, but I feel like there is a long way to go to make this code "safe" regardless of language. " , elsewhere "I get that this project probably values developer efficiency over safety or correctness, and probably makes sense in this use case.", etc. Still smells kind of elitist to me.
How would you describe the trade-off between safety and the developer productivity listed as the reason in the article?
The comment seems to just be saying that it’s reasonable for someone to make this trade off when they are more knowledgeable and familiar with one language rather than another.
I think your reading quite a bit into that comment to take it as elitist.
> I think your reading quite a bit into that comment to take it as elitist.
"... there is a long way to go to make this code "safe" regardless of language." and "...values developer efficiency over ... correctness ..." are somewhat uncomplimentary additions to their main points, no matter how you look at it.
Exactly. A bunch of link spam to reddit or quora doesn’t add up to evidence that the Rust community is reasonable or fair in its evaluation of alternative language choices or trade-offs against other languages.
No, not at all. Rust is a very good tool and is useful in many situations. I believe it offers better automatic memory safety.
However, there are many cases when Rust is not a good tool for the job, and when specifically having greater manual control of memory or thread safety is a better choice. Additionally, in many applications you can build almost everything in a fully dynamically typed language, often interpreted as well, and only choose small sections of code to target for a specialized compiled implementation.
In those cases, avoiding the overhead of a compiler and using rapid unit tests with high coverage as an alternative to compiler checks may often be a far safer and superior way to develop code, leading to adequately safe and performant code that is easier to maintain, faster to create, easier to explain, etc.
All I’m saying is that Rust is another tool in the toolbox. It’s not intrinsically or unilaterally better than any other tool, and other tools can inhabit parts of trade-off space that make them better choices than Rust, even for applications that need memory safety or high performance.
In my experience though, most interactions with Rust community leave me feeling like a vocal and significant fraction are trying to seriously claim that Rust is categorically and unilaterally a better choice across almost all possible use cases, let alone across a wide range of practical use cases.
I think it's still fair to say that the Rust community either attracts, or doesn't discourage this type of advocate in a way that other communities don't. Personally I've encountered this type of behavior in a few situations:
1. When Swift for TensorFlow was announced, the team released a document explaining that they had narrowed the language choice to 4 languages including Rust, and eliminated Rust based on the sharp learning curve. Once commenter unrelated to the project logged an issue on the GitHub page and went on for many multi-paragraph quotes about how Rust should have been the choice.
2. In a thread about gfx-portability, which similar to MoltenVK brings the Vulkan API to Apple platfortms, when the original poster was questioned about the comparative completeness and and performance of these two implementations, they were completely unable to offer details (like come on, you can't even say what percentage of the tests are passing based on the Vulkan portability standards? You never benchmarked against the most similar product on the market?) and deflected to making totally unfounded claims about how MoltenVK is unsafe and even dangerous to use.
3. In a thread about Rust syntax, I made a comment about how I personally lamented some of the choices made in the language, like going with snake_case as a convention, and naming dynamic arrays Vector. I was promptly downvoted and received several fervent responses explaining why my personal taste was objectively wrong.
I think Rust is an interesting and promising language, but there does seem to be a somewhat tribal tendency in the community which is a turn-off for me.
I am not going to draw the conclusion that Rust does not have an elitist community from <5 replies, just how you would not want me to draw the conclusion to the opposite based on a handful of people, right?
You'll notice the top rated comment, & majority of comments, agrees with their decision to switch to C++. Yet we'll persist that Rust is an elitist community..