this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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"Rust's compiler prevents common bugs" So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it. What is it with the rust crowd that they have to come acrosslike people trying to convert your religion at your front door?

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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I'd guess it's Rust fan's genuine belief that they have something revolutionary.

“Rust’s compiler prevents common bugs” So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it.

If you're that much of a galaxybrain, you should be writing everything directly in opcodes. In reality, nobody is and we invented languages to help us perform an activity the human brain is very poorly suited to.

This attitude also means that OP stares at their own obvious bugs on a screen all day and then decides they're great, which is frightening level of detachment from reality to me.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 14 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Skill issue takes are dumb as fuck. It's just republican personal responsibility takes using different language.

Intelligent people focus on producing systemically better outcomes.

[–] purplerabbit@beehaw.org 2 points 3 hours ago

I mean... they do kinda have a point on the last part. I'm no programmer or coder. I can't code for shit. I don't know a lot about development. And even I have the feeling that Rust people, they're kinda like NixOS people a while back, they never shut the fuck up about it. :3

They're definitely enthusiastic, I'll give them that. But so many projects are sold solely on the fact that they are made with Rust, even though it means absolutely nothing to most users.

I remember when System76 announced that they were making a new desktop environment and the only thing they basically said about it back then was that it was made with Rust and it felt like my corner of the internet lost their mind about it like they had announced the second coming of Christ or something.

[–] Scoopta@programming.dev 16 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

While I do totally see the advantages of rust and agree skill is not a solution given people make mistakes...I do agree a lot of the very vocal rust advocates do act almost religious and it is an annoying turn off.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 hours ago

Do you have time to talk about our lord Rust? Did you know it died for our bugs so we don't have to debug them at run time?

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 9 points 10 hours ago

We had the Java guys in year 2000, at least Rust seems to be a decent language.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

The language/compiler restricting some bad practices makes safer code with less skill. Btw, there's also Safe C++

[–] AnotherPenguin@programming.dev 8 points 12 hours ago

Everyone makes mistakes, no matter the level of skill

[–] mokus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 29 points 16 hours ago

“Should I use rust or c++” is the wrong question IMO. The right question is “do I want the code I run, written by thousands or millions of randos, to be written in rust or c++”.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

The really annoying part is all the people saying that you shouldn't like Rust because actually it's not magically bug free. Yeah, no shit. No one who touched Rust claims it lets you write bug free code. People like Rust because it's modern, fast, has great tooling, great documentation and really nice features like Traits and Algebraic data types. Memory and thread safety is just a bonus.

[–] cbazero@programming.dev -3 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Ammm actually... ☝️🤓 most Rust evengalists claim that Rust prevents you from writing bugs

[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Any type safe language will help you prevent a wide range of bugs that non safe languages need tons of tests to detect.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

We're talking about memory safety here, though.

[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 31 minutes ago

Same argument though, just a different value for the topic.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 4 points 6 hours ago

It's hard to argue with that statement. Like, literally, I have no idea who rust evangelists are, where to look for them and how to find out what "most" of them think about anything.

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 43 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

The human mind has limited capacity for things to pay attention to. If your attention is occupied with tiptoeing around the loaded guns scattered all over the floor, sooner or later you’ll slip and trip over one.

Of course, you’re a virtuoso programmer, so you can pirouette balletically around the floorguns as you deliver brilliantly efficient code. Which is great, until you have an off day, or you get bored of coding, run off to join the circus as a professional knife-juggler and your codebase is inherited by someone of more conventional aptitude.

Programming languages offering to keep track of some of the things programmers need to be aware of has been a boon for maintainability of code and, yes, security. Like type systems: there’s a reason we no longer write assembly language, squeezing multiple things into the bits of a register, unless we’re doing party tricks like demo coding or trying to push very limited systems to their limits.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 19 points 18 hours ago

... until you have an off day, or you get bored of coding, run off to join the circus as a professional knife-juggler and your codebase is inherited by someone of more conventional aptitude.

Sometimes you even have to deal with having mere mortals on your team!

[–] wer2@lemmy.zip -2 points 15 hours ago

Which is why garbage collection is the way to go.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 101 points 1 day ago (4 children)
  • if your skill is so great that you would never cause the kinds of bugs the rust compiler is designed to prevent, then it will never keep you from compiling, and therefore your complaint is unnecessary and you can happily use rust
  • if you do encounter these error messages, then you are apparently not skilled enough to not use rust, and should use rust

In summary: use rust.

[–] tatterdemalion@programming.dev 20 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Your first point is not true. There are valid uses of memory sharing that rust will reject.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Curious what you are talking about. Multi-threaded sharing of memory for example is also easy with rust, it just doesn't let you wrote and read at the same time, and so on.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 3 points 11 hours ago

Off the top of my head, single-threaded writing to the same memory from different fields of a struct. Not to mention self-referencing like if you want to hold a buffer and have different views into it in the same structure.

[–] F04118F 33 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

I don't agree with /u/red-crayon-scribbles ' approach to memory safety, but what you're saying isn't entirely true either.

It is possible to manipulate memory in ways that do not conform to Rust's lifecycle/ownership model. In theory, this can even be done correctly.

The problem is that in practice, this leads to the following, many of which were committed by some of the most highly skilled C developers alive, including major kernel contributors:

https://xeiaso.net/blog/series/no-way-to-prevent-this/

[–] Midnitte@beehaw.org 15 points 19 hours ago

...echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only language where 90% of the world's memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to have security vulnerabilities.

ooof.

[–] kurwa@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

You can do that in Rust with the unsafe keyword

[–] Maddier1993@programming.dev 13 points 16 hours ago

but that's just a choice whereas in C you have no choice but write flawless code.

[–] jatone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

it always astounds me how utterly arrogant people are about their own abilities. (myself included) but seriously who the fuck doesnt like having something that just prevents you from doing things that are obviously broken and not going to work?

[–] i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 25 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It’s like going to city hall and complaining your tax dollars are being spent on guardrails along the road that you haven’t personally ever driven into.

[–] Coldcell@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago

Which, for the record, people fully actually do.

[–] Decq@lemmy.world 12 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

This so true, every one complaining that the borrow checker is annoying isn't apparently aware what they used to do was inherently flawed. Sure there a some, though rare, false positives. But they are easily mitigated. These people are exactly that what they themselves are complaining about, elitist.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 12 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah. Once you get used to the (verbose, but by no means unergonomic!) syntax, you'll probably never be happy with another language again. Job-wise, I am currently mostly using Go, and while also a nice language, I miss the confidence and security I took for granted with rust.

Not to mention just how goddamn expressive rust can be. Let bindings like if ok/err, else return? Assign from a match on Some(Ok(x))? Filter, map, and friends on any iterator? Oh my GOD the error handling with the question mark iterator? 100% confidence that if it compiles, no error, possible null value, or case is unhandled.

And all this WHILE giving you the amazing security benefits!

Ah, damn, caught me proselytizing again.

[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Lol build something with serde and you'll be hooked for life

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 4 points 13 hours ago

Or a CLI with clap.

[–] tdawg@lemmy.world 9 points 16 hours ago

A real programmer only needs parentheses smdh

[–] b_tr3e@feddit.org 35 points 21 hours ago

The problem with these followers of rust is that they're heathens, disbelievers and worshippers of the devil. Just like all of you heretics. There is just one programming language for the true believer and it is FORTRAN. The pure and true FORTRAN, that is, which is punched into cards of virgin paper, not the heresy created by the blasphemy of 99.

[–] zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone 29 points 20 hours ago

C's compiler prevents common type bugs and handles things like register allocation for you? So does skill.

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 52 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

At this point, I've seen far more people being almost violently anti-rust than I've seen people being weirdly enthusiastic about rust. If Rust people are Jehovah's Witnesses, then a lot of the anti-Rust people are ISIS.

[–] SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 18 hours ago

It's like the people complaining about SJWs and cancel culture. Sure, some people are annoying and use these things to harass others, but the vast majority are just normal people who care about certain things. But people on the other side, when they can't provide a good argument against them, start to vilify the people themselves. It's similar to how right wingers cry about decorum when they're more likely to vote for rapists.

I must admit that I had given into this anti-SJW hate at some point in my late teens, but I luckily realized how I was acting like a little bitch, hating on people I don't even know just because they're passionate about equality. The funny thing was, I still believed in their causes, but was pretty much brainwashed into believing that they're hurting the cause by being vocal. It's weird how dumb we often are.

[–] baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

i think one factor (though definitely not all) of the dislike is the politics of the project, which are fairly inclusive and kind. some people can't stomach that. another factor might be that the mere existence of rust implies that a lot of people are not the 100x rockstar developer they might aspire to be. maybe it's also just a simple change = bad. though i have seen people who dislike rust also gravitate towards zig, and that also has some big differences. maybe it's a hate towards mozilla? when i talk to people who hate rust they don't articulate themselves well, so i have to speculate and i get nowhere. one thing i do hear about rust a lot is that it's ugly, but I don't really get that. i can't personally fathom disdaining to use a tool simply because of looks, and i also don't personally think rust is ugly.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 12 points 18 hours ago

I think a bunch of C programmers hate rust passionately because they always looked down their noses at principled languages for being slow.

Now a principled language is beating them on both speed and safety and it's as if the jocks lost a baseball game to the nerds who studied dynamics of solids and cut a series of little slots in their bats so that every time they hit the ball it went out of the park.

So much hate for the clever win over the brute force.

[–] kurwa@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago

Correct me if I'm wrong because I never used Zig before, but I believe people like it because of the transparency in what the code is doing, like there's no hidden functionality. Where as Rust definitely does do that.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 22 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

I love this argument because it means this dude is the only skilled C developer on the planet. Chromium devs are just chumps that should be replaced by this uncommon God.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 8 hours ago

If we measure only by the amount of mistakes, there would be much more skilled C developers. Take my pristine skills for example, I've made zero mistakes writing all of my 3 lines of C code over years and years, zero mistakes

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 22 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

"So does skill" I agree 100%

However, we're human. You show me a skilled developer who never causes bugs, and I'll show you a liar.

No matter how skilled or experienced a developer is, they always have the capacity to introduce a bug by accident.

Whether it's a typo, or simply being tired or distracted, or just having one of those moments, or even one of those days. It's completely normal.

Coding is just communication, and when working on larger codebases it can be just as nuanced as interpersonal communication. People miscommunicate every second of the day.

I've never used Rust.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

Because most projects are worked on by multiple people, and you shouldn't trust that everyone who will work on something will have the same skill level as you

If there are two languages otherwise equivalent in NFRs, where one lets you make the mistakes and the other doesn't, you're a bit silly if you don't pick the latter.

Good engineers shouldn't struggle to use a different language, so that's not an argument

[–] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Gonna guess, basically the same thing. Easy answers to hard questions instead of you having to think about them.

So, as far as they would be concerned, the only reason more people haven't chosen that path must be because they don't know how much easier it is, and how much less they have to think about stuff.

They can't see that building skill and knowledge has value beyond the extra effort.

[–] tonytins@pawb.social 6 points 1 day ago

Glances at the mountains of horror stories a single bug in a C program caused