Rust is a programming language introduced a couple of decades ago. From a programming language design point of view it's relatively unremarkable, even ugly, lacks quite many features that most other programming languages have (such as inheritance), uses horrendous naming schemes especially for its standard library, and is not very different from the literally hundreds and hundreds of similar languages that have been invented in the past 40 years.
However, if you were to listen to the Rust cult, it's the Second Coming of Christ.
And the strangest thing is that a lot of program development companies and communities are rushing to replace everything they have with Rust code, for no discernible reason.
It's literally like a religion. There was, for example, a recent speech given at a conference related to a large open source software project (I think it was related to Wayland, or Ubuntu, or something like that), where the presenter sounded more like a preacher than a programmer, exalting the virtues of Rust, and encouraging his listeners to write everything in, and replace everything with Rust code, in his own words "unashamedly".
There is indeed, a strange cult mentality going on with that crowd. For example, the Ubuntu project has been absolutely rushing to replace all the Gnu Core Utils with versions written in Rust. Not because there's something wrong with those programs, but just because. The prevailing mentality is that the programs become somehow "better" if they are written in Rust.
Indeed, it literally doesn't matter if the program only implements 80% of the functionality of the original, consumes twice as much memory for the same task, and is 10 times slower than the original, it's still better, only and solely because it's written in Rust. (Those are not just made-up hypothetical numbers and statements. They are based on actual real examples and actual real comments by Rust cultists.)
In other words, Ubuntu (and with them more and more distros) are replacing your command line utilities with versions that are not backwards compatible and are often slower and consume more memory, and quite explicitly do not offer any new features or advantages of the originals (something that they actually proudly proclaim), yet according to them that's somehow better, just because it's written with Rust.
Rust is the only programming language for which its developers feel the need to advertise its use in project names eg. in github. Indeed, "(some program) written in Rust" has almost become a meme by this point because of how ubiquitous it is. No other programming language does this. They advertise it as if the program somehow magically becomes better because it's written in Rust.
Likewise, it's to my knowledge the only programming language that advertises itself in names of plugins. For example, there's an ad blocker plugin for web browsers named "adblock-rust". There is no "adblock-java", or "adblock-c++", or "adblock-python", or "adblock-javascript", but there is "adblock-rust". That "rust" is supposed to make it somehow magically better, just because it is there.
And the religion of Rust is astonishingly virulent. For example, Linus Torvalds originally wrote the Linux kernel in C, and for over 30 years he had the extremely strict rule that the kernel is and will always be written in C, and nothing else, and he had a long list of arguments for why. Unsurprisingly, over the decades dozens of alternative programming languages have been suggested, and Torvalds and the kernel development team have always summarily rejected all of them. It's C, period.
Except, and you guessed it right, for an unfathomable reason Torvalds recently threw all that away and allowed adding Rust support to the kernel. Why? Nobody knows. I don't think even he himself knows.
And what do you know, one of the first components written in Rust added to the kernel caused a bad memory corruption problem that caused the kernel to crash.
That's highly ironic because the Rust cultists precisely laud and worship the language for being "memory safe". Yes, so "memory safe" that it caused the kernel to crash due to... memory corruption.
Not to be beaten, some time ago Cloudflare, which is one of the largest internet infrastructure providers in the world experienced a complete blackout, which left half of the internet inaccessible for quite a while. The reason? They had rushed to replace their existing code with Rust. And the reason for the crash? You guessed it: Memory corruption.
So much for "memory safety".
And mind you: They replaced perfectly working code with Rust versions for no discernible reason, introducing the memory corruption bug.
There's also the funny case of a large company that had a large codebase written in Rust which was doing an enormous amount of data crunching, but then they experimented with replacing the code with JavaScript and it became significantly faster and more efficient (like by a factor of 2 or so.)
That's right, JavaScript, of all languages.
But none of that matters. To the Rust cultists, all programs become automatically better if written in Rust, even if they are slower, even if they are less efficient, even if they only provide half of the features than older software, and even if they experience memory corruption crashes.
Oh, and try to criticize their Holy Rust in any of their forums, or anywhere where they dwell? You'll be absolutely crucified. You will have committed heresy. I'm not even exaggerating.
Comments
Post a Comment