[HN Gopher] Rust is a disappointment
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Rust is a disappointment
Author : byko3y
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-11-23 21:52 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| EnPissant wrote:
| AI written ragebait.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I think we've officially reached the inflection point where the
| Rust haters have become more annoying than the Rust evangelists.
| Maybe in a couple years we will finally be able to stop writing
| blog post about it.
| edoceo wrote:
| Not to worry, another tech thing will be along shortly to fill
| the hype/hate cycle with its own drivel.
| lumost wrote:
| We really just need official/honest guidance on Rust for what
| works and what doesn't. The classic example is the dodging
| around cyclic datastructures.
|
| Tl;DR Rust doesn't support any form of cyclic datastructure
| without indirection or unsafe. The indirection tooling is weak,
| and most real examples simply switch to unsafe rust. Unsafe
| rust is completely fine if you know what you are doing with
| memory, and is ok to use in these situations.
|
| There are a few other gotchas that we just need to be clear
| about, some of these gotchas are limiting for developing higher
| level software and some are not e.g. String handling. If you
| are comfortable with unsafe, the rust toolchain is vastly
| superior to C/C++ development making it as close to an ideal
| replacement as we are likely to get.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| So, Ada?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Totally wrong.
|
| > Its compilation is slow. I mean SLOW. Slower than C++.
|
| No way. Maybe Rust 1.0, but it's steadily improved and it's
| definitely faster than C++ now.
|
| > It's complex. Just as complex as C++.
|
| True, but the problem with C++'s complexity is that you have to
| memorise all of it or you'll accidentally invoke UB. It's so
| complex that is basically impossible.
|
| Rust is complex but most of the time the compiler will tell you
| if you got it wrong. There are exceptions of course (lots of
| async footguns) but it's still night and day.
|
| > Memory safety is not that sacred. In fact, for many
| applications malfunctioning is better than crashing
|
| Not sure I really need to counter this...
|
| > When handling lots of mutable shared state (GUI, DB, stateful
| services, OS/hardware), the performance of native Rust memory
| model is subpar, and non-native unsafes just leave you with slow
| compilation, high complexity, and no memory safety in the end --
| which makes Rust practically meaningless for heavy mutable state
| jobs.
|
| Not totally clear what he's getting at here. Maybe the ergonomics
| of GUI style programming which are still being figured out?
| Hardly a deal breaker though is it? There are plenty of C/C++ GUI
| libraries with terrible ergonomics and the only one that is
| actually great (Qt) had to use a custom language extension for
| decades to achieve that.
|
| > So, is the Rust bad or good? It's neither. It's a mediocre
| programming language with thousands of man-month put into its
| development
|
| I would love to hear what he thinks a good programming language
| is, because I can easily pick more holes in any other language
| than he has.
|
| This anti-Rust zealotry is super tedious.
| Animats wrote:
| > "there is just no perfect correctness possible in the Turing
| machine model"
|
| Grrr. Clueless people keep saying that. People have been
| verifying programs for over forty years now. Formal correctness
| in terms of not violating assertions is possible for most useful
| programs. As someone pointed out about the Microsoft Static
| Driver Verifier, if you're program is anywhere near
| undecidability, it has no business being in the kernel. This not
| a legit criticism.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| The author would probably find joy in using Zig.
|
| Personally my biggest complain from Rust is that I wish it was
| more readable. I've seen function signatures that seemed straight
| out of C++.
| Havoc wrote:
| I was waiting for the part where author advocates for what they
| like but no it's just a rant
| commandersaki wrote:
| I can accept compilation being slow, slower than C++, but do
| large projects require >32GB memory, for example the case of
| LLVM, Chromium, or Envoy?
|
| Had to buy a new laptop because of this.
| baby wrote:
| I mean there's nothing better than Rust, just talk about what in
| Rust is annoying instead of saying that
| cetra3 wrote:
| > Node.js and Go are considered practically safe language
|
| Node JS has had vulnerabilities in the past:
| https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2021-22940/
|
| Go is also not Memory safe:
| https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html
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(page generated 2025-11-23 23:00 UTC)