I hate Rust (programming language)
Now, hear me out, it’s the middle of the night here and I’m feeling a bit rusty with my English, but we’ll try to be creative with this one. There are many ways in which we can say that we have a poisonous community, and I’ll enumerate a few in this article. Also, obviously, this is a very subjective article. It’s not about technical merits, although it will mention those as well, it’s more about the social engineering around Rust (programming language). But I hate it, and I don’t even have to touch Rust code yet (but probably will in the future). So join me in this wonderful trip of discovery to see in how many ways we can say the same thing, which is that the Rust community sucks.
I tried learning Rust three different times. The first time it was way before 2020, when the first drops of enthusiasm around the language started to whet people’s appetites. Probably 2015, probably prompted by the release of 1.0, and I can tell that it looked interesting. I tried to learn it then, but I can’t remember what the problem was - I probably didn’t even go through a full write-compile-execute cycle for a „Hello World” program, most likely because I was burned out and in denial about it. I read a bit about the language, though, took note, said „yeah, that sounds interesting” about its „const by default” strategy, and moved on.
My second time was somewhere right before 2020, in pre-pandemic aka „the good old” times. Back then I was already in full burnout mode and I opened a Rust book because learning new things made me feel like I was reconnecting with my love for computer science in general. For some reason, learning new things was a good burnout coping mechanism, but everyone’s burnout is different. So I started reading on Rust and the first chapter proved to be a moral lesson about inclusion, and I was like… friend. I’m not here for a diversity lecture, I’m here to learn about the language. But there it went, the book talked about being Rustaceans (I really hated the term), in love with diversity, and it felt more like a brainwashing DEI lecture than a serious conversation about a technical topic. This time, though, I tried a bit more of the language, I actually wrote some programs, used some libraries to do something relatively small, and it felt deeply unsatisfying - mostly because the libraries weren’t there yet. I also disliked cargo, as well as the way that the book suggested I should set-up Rust, which I see is the current way it’s recommended to be installed as well - by downloading and running a script off the internet. As a 80s and 90s kid, this felt irresponsible. It still is, but we’ll talk about this later.
