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southernwolf@pawb.social

Could someone fill me in on the Rust situation? (piefed.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 day ago by cloudskater@piefed.blahaj.zone 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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[–] forestbeasts@pawb.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 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

[–] cloudskater@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] forestbeasts@pawb.social 2 points 1 day 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