This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.
I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).
I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.
I'm not a Rust contributor and I don't care for some of the challenges that come with Rust, but I love what it accomplished and I find it does it very well. Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.
You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission here on HN for years.
Which is what C++ enthusiasts have done to C enthusiasts and C enthusiasts have done to assembly enthusiasts.
I suspect that Rust will start taking over as a dominant LLM output language.
I also suspect that in short order we'll have entirely new languages that are engineered to be ideal languages for LLMs to generate. Perhaps even safer than Rust.
The models are shockingly good at writing Rust. You don't even need to have familiarity with Rust to start using it now. You'll learn the language as you interact with the LLMs.
Then again, your very username implies an indulgence in viewing technology through the lens of fandoms which is... weird
Rust proponent organizing social media brigades and making lists of people to target, apparently for harassment:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292
> Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.
> Thinking of literally starting a Linux maintainer hall of shame. Not for public consumption, but to help new kernel contributors know what to expect.
> Every experienced kernel submitter has this in their head, maybe it should be finally written down.
> Okay I literally just started this privately and the first 3 names involved are all people named variants on "Christ". Maybe there's a pattern here... religion secretly trying to sabotage the Linux kernel behind the scenes???
> Edit: /s because apparently some people need it.
Steve Klabnik and much of the Rust community vehemently defending and justifying Hector Martin's actions here and elsewhere.
>
Attempted murder against a Rust critic:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Swatting-Open-source-developer-...
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-dev-swatte...
>
Rust bots will downvote this post, because the humans behind the bots dislike truth that brings their actions to light.
.
It was basically a complete derail to backdoor in a conversation about why they think everything should be in Rust.
OpenBSD still uses CVS, C and Make because that's what works for them. They will continue to keep using C, Make and CVS but that enables them to be productive with the contributors that they have. Moving things to other languages will not increase their productivity. That's the biggest thing that the largely-fanatical Rust evangelists completely fail to understand.
Please provide a link to this comment.
Someone asked an honest question and got reasonable responses that were informative. At no point did anyone chide the project for not using Rust.
> Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.
Nah, people complaining about the supposed toxic community are noisier than the supposed toxic community.
Rust proponent organizing social media brigades and making lists of people to target, apparently for harassment:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292
> Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.
> Thinking of literally starting a Linux maintainer hall of shame. Not for public consumption, but to help new kernel contributors know what to expect.
> Every experienced kernel submitter has this in their head, maybe it should be finally written down.
> Okay I literally just started this privately and the first 3 names involved are all people named variants on "Christ". Maybe there's a pattern here... religion secretly trying to sabotage the Linux kernel behind the scenes???
> Edit: /s because apparently some people need it.
Steve Klabnik and much of the Rust community vehemently defending and justifying Hector Martin's actions here and elsewhere.
>
Attempted murder against a Rust critic:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Swatting-Open-source-developer-...
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-dev-swatte...
>
Rust bots will downvote this post, because the humans behind the bots dislike truth that brings their actions to light.
Then why is it weird if you're saying the same thing? Different programming languages appeal to programmers with different tastes, and so it makes sense that some programmers would be drawn to language X and dislike language Y, while others would be the opposite.
I'm old-ish though and grew up apolitical, so I'm sure it's just a me problem.
Edit: Thought about scare quoting “taste”
Ghostty is fine I guess, I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features.
Zig is fine, has some cool stuff, the community seems roughly the same as the rust, with again just way less features.
The rest of the hashi tools are fine, I don’t really use any of them anymore. Vault was a big deal at some point I guess
I don’t use Zig, and frequently use Rust, but I’ve never really interacted with the core development team for either. I don’t think it’s necessary to care about whatever culture is driving development once it has sufficient velocity. The Rust I use today is more than enough for my needs. Maybe if I were more involved in open source I would better understand why culture matters, but unfortunately I’m mostly a consumer of it, not a producer.
> Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress
"My tribe is better than your tribe"
Some people thrive inside this mentality, whole others don't go near it.
Not everyone is thinking like this but a lot of people do. So because of that it's a common heuristic to think of it as "war" because there are some people who do that gladly.
Rust proponent organizing social media brigades and making lists of people to target, apparently for harassment:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292
> Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.
> Thinking of literally starting a Linux maintainer hall of shame. Not for public consumption, but to help new kernel contributors know what to expect.
> Every experienced kernel submitter has this in their head, maybe it should be finally written down.
> Okay I literally just started this privately and the first 3 names involved are all people named variants on "Christ". Maybe there's a pattern here... religion secretly trying to sabotage the Linux kernel behind the scenes???
> Edit: /s because apparently some people need it.
Steve Klabnik and much of the Rust community vehemently defending and justifying Hector Martin's actions here and elsewhere.
>
Attempted murder against a Rust critic:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Swatting-Open-source-developer-...
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-dev-swatte...
>
Rust bots will downvote this post, because the humans behind the bots dislike truth that brings their actions to light.
,
In hindsight (and at risk of starting a flame war), it's easier to be magnanimous when you are winning/have won.
Rust's big tentpole is "no memory management bugs, everything must be provably safe", whereas Zig is very proud of "no memory management, you have full control but you have to exercise it". I don't feel as though these are competing for the same audience or mindshare.
I've used Zig a big (while trying to contribute to ghostty, at least), and it's an interesting language that I like the aesthetics of but I don't want to use. I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).
I share your complaints about the tools you came to Rust from, but the philosophy of not letting you go off script is great until it doesn't work for you. A lot of the reason some of us use the more flexible languages is because we've been in situations where a language and its ecosystem either won't let you do something outright or not without significant pain. Often when everything is on fire and your customers are cancelling contracts. You can't afford to wait for the core team or community to come in and save you in these situations.
Having access to work around your problems is also the source of a lot of the pain you're talking about, but at least you get to stay in business to solve that problem tomorrow.
To a very large degree, a lot of the Rust evangelists that I encounter in the wild are either hobbyists, academics or paid open source contributors at large companies. Most of the discussions I've seen wrt Rust at companies with actual deliverables stop at "Rust? Absolutely not.". Except for a very narrow set of systems where you want the kind of guarantees that Rust provides as a primary feature. For more general situations, the tradeoffs often aren't worth it.
Oh, please...if you haven't noticed the carpet bombing of rust advocacy on HN for more than 4 years and still in progress, you're deliberately not paying attention.
I might stay away from a particularly toxic community or one with wildly different values, but I don't really get why you wouldn't write Rust just because of how some people post about it. Odd tbh. I find the whole thing about "oh the rust zealots" hand wringing stuff so silly, really.
Rust proponent organizing social media brigades and making lists of people to target, apparently for harassment:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/1292
> Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.
> Thinking of literally starting a Linux maintainer hall of shame. Not for public consumption, but to help new kernel contributors know what to expect.
> Every experienced kernel submitter has this in their head, maybe it should be finally written down.
> Okay I literally just started this privately and the first 3 names involved are all people named variants on "Christ". Maybe there's a pattern here... religion secretly trying to sabotage the Linux kernel behind the scenes???
> Edit: /s because apparently some people need it.
Steve Klabnik and much of the Rust community vehemently defending and justifying Hector Martin's actions here and elsewhere.
>
Attempted murder against a Rust critic:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Swatting-Open-source-developer-...
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-dev-swatte...
>
Rust bots will downvote this post, because the humans behind the bots dislike truth that brings their actions to light
I think I get the point about "Rust culture" (although it's too vague to agree or disagree with, probably on purpose).
But in 2026, Rust is fully a commodity language, and especially to compare it to Zig in this angle is bizarre. Even turning my stereotypes to 11 and thinking back to when I worked with a team developing Rust professionally in 2021, I'd say we got mostly ended up hiring "proglang enthusiasts" and not "Rust people." In terms of "cultural dilution" alone Zig is orders of magnitude more culty than Rust because that many fewer people use it.
> I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).
Kind of reeks of unreasonable expectations to me. I don't think one should expect language designers to redesign a language or introduce new features that would likely be poor fits with the overall existing language philosophy (the design and usage philosophies behind Rust and Zig are practically opposite poles). Language stewards have a responsibility to everyone in their existing user base and they have a responsibility to evolve the language in a ways that's consistent with the expectations they already established (if they want to keep their users that is). Expecting the designers to rework the language to bolt on features from some other language just for your project is kind of absurd. I think Loris's supposed response is actually correct here and probably the best response he could give, without knowing more about precisely what the requests were, how willing you were to contribute work yourself, etc.
The C++ community and the Zig community seem to get along fine, so it not about looking up at the entrenched thing or down at the new thing, many orders of magnitude there and no drama.
Python, R, and Julia folks all seem to get along.
On the frontend there are a zillion things that compile to JS and even in the big camp the frameworks are split 9 ways, you get a little heat here and there over Vercel throwing big bucks or something but it's rare, generally the Svelte people and the Astro people seem to not mind when the other one front pages or whatever.
Rust is at war with the world. Maybe it can even win but it's a weird road to walk by choice.
The Zig Evangelism Task Force has supplanted Rust as the premier hypebeast. And they'll be supplanted by the NEXT BIG THING.
There aren't more forks because once you fork something you take on the burden of synchronization, or you forfeit the benefit of future upstream work. To focus on Ghostty, Mitchell has taken on the effort of maintaining cross-platform support. If I want one specific feature (or even a bunch of features) and create a custom fork, but then GTK changes, now I have to support that change myself (assuming it is relevant to me or my community of users), or figure out a way to integrate Mitchell's changes into my fork, or I risk losing my customizations by having to rollback to baseline if the differences between my fork and baseline are too great.
If the system is well-engineered (the work on libghostty helps here) then you can keep that common core without forking, and fork just things on the periphery of the system. But well-engineered is not common.
> PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data.
CLI programs should operate on text. If you want to parse and format it, do so, but the default output mode should be plain text, so that I can pipe it into grep or awk without a second thought.
I am continuously irritated that the AWS CLI defaults to outputting in JSON. No one (I hope…) is using that tool in programs; that’s what boto3 and its ilk are for. But if humans are reading it, why default to something that they’re almost certainly going to be piping into jq if only for the formatting help?
Basically Unix has a long tradition of "everything is a file" and a big ecosystem of coreutils that are based around text and windows.. didn't. You can't look at /dev or /etc and learn anything about the machine. They had a few generations of APIs and wanted to give admins and power users any shell at all instead of a GUI. So the shell is centered around making those APIs accessible, rather than piping grep and sed or whatever.
Linux tools that are starting to output raw JSON by default are indeed a nuisance, but how else can you achieve structured output if no standard shell supports it? It's a chicken and egg problem.
here is an elvish shell command that converts a freetube playlist from json into a list of urls grouped by author:
for i (cat 'freetube-playlist-favorites.db' | from-json)["videos"] {
mkdir -p $i['author']
print http://youtu.be/$i['videoId'] >> $i['author']/get }
curl -s -H "Authorization: token <redacted>" "https://api.zerotier.com/api/v1/network/<redacted>/member" |
all (from-json) |
order &key={|d| put $d[name]} |
each { |device|
var t = (printf "%.0f" (/ $device[lastSeen] 1000))
if (> 20000000 (- (date '+%s') $t)) {
print (date -R --date='@'$t) $device[config][ipAssignments] $device[name] "\n" } }
In the AWS case the tools talk to an API server, so sure, you can call the API server directly or use a wrapper that does, but what about all the other CLI apps that don't? The CLI program is the API.
I built a CLI program that wraps luks + btrfs, and they only offer a `--json` output option for a few commands. I have to write an ad hoc parser for each command since raw text includes arbitrary formatting and presentation lipstick that the creator came up with. And I have to do extra work to avoid breaking changes at the parser level instead of the higher data level.
If I had to pick between the two, json would at least solve the data representation part so that I can build on top of it. And it's trivial to go data (json) -> pretty print rather than pretty print -> data.
I can see it being annoying if all you care about is using CLI programs by hand, but it seems like a mild upside compared to the downsides the second you want to consume it programmatically, even if it's with a chain of awk, cut, and tr.
"My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite" by Zig's author Andrew Kelley
TL;DR: No comment.
That's all that needed to be said. He only makes himself and the rest of the Zig "community" look as petty as some of the worst Rust people with the surrounding remarks. Why does anyone need to care what a few randoms think of a language? Either it gets used or it doesn't.
The stupid thing is getting up in arms because someone said something you don't like.