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  • Sep 13, 2026, 9:31 AM

    Still not a fan of Rust. It took all of the worst patterns of C++ and made them safe, which results in something that’s familiar and “basically fine I guess” but extraordinarily annoying and frustrating to work with. All of the best practices for writing efficient and maintainable low-level code like avoiding allocations or branches are very awkward in Rust. It makes sense as a product of Mozilla which had one of the worst C++ code bases of all time deciding that the real problem of that code base was not architectural or structural but simply that managing all of those pointers manually was hard. In theory it should be possible to write clean Rust but none of the foundational crates are written that way. Async/await is easily the most frustrating aspect of the language and the community is determined to make everything async if it can. Compile times and resource consumption during compilation are terrible and kind of ruins the otherwise great tooling.

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  • Sep 13, 2026, 9:54 AM

    Another aspect of Rust that I don’t like is its capture by companies like Amazon and Microsoft. I have no faith in the future direction of the language being anything other than slop.

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  • Sep 13, 2026, 1:01 PM

    @krig IMO the very worst of C++ *is* the unsafety. Despite claims of higher-level abstractions I’ve usually been more afraid of messing up with memory in C++ than I was in straight C (not that I’ve programmed all that much of either of them).

    I kinda get what you mean though, but I think there’s a room for a programming language that helps you write code that’s significantly higher performance than the mainstream high level languages at the cost of making those lower abstractions awkward.

    Anyway, I think the problem here is that C++ tried to cover *such* a wide breadth of problem domains that the successors to C++ probably ought to be several different languages making different tradeoffs. I think it makes sense to view Rust as *one of* those.

    I guess one way to view it is that Rust is *not* as low-level language as typical usage of C, Zig or Hare, and that’s OK.

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  • Sep 13, 2026, 1:04 PM

    @krig I’m worried about the corporate takeover stuff.
    And sorta connected to that: the whole LLM-hype. But Rust seems to be one of the languages in it’s space that still has a fairly significant resistance to LLM-stuff, esp. if you compare to something like Swift world where skepticism seems kinda rare.

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  • Sep 13, 2026, 1:16 PM

    @torb For context I use rust and choose rust over other options most of the time... but many aspects of it do not "spark joy", at least not for me. I don't begrudge anyone who does find it enjoyable to use.

    As far as memory safety in C++, in idiomatic modern C++ this is largely an avoidable issue these days, just don't create object-based pointer soup. The rust solution was to enforce pointer soup but have the compiler verify lifetimes. Which works! But it's not the only possible solution to the problem. I think my preferred language would be more like a safe C or Zig and less like a safe C++98.

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  • Sep 13, 2026, 1:22 PM

    @krig I honestly think what a lot of people like in Rust is sum types that are enforced by the compiler and are not really using it for very low level stuff.

    Like, personally two languages I’m interested in these days are Rust and Gleam. Gleam is bit *too* minimally functional language for me (though, I’m definitely learning to like it more and more).

    Of course, that in-the-middle language in many ways is Swift. Value semantics is really cool and easy to reason about, but lets you do (local!) mutation without worrying too much.

    However, while Swift is nominally based on Objective-C, Swift *really* does seem like the heir to C++ (modern C++ specifically). It really has the kitchen sink (though, still smaller than C++). Some of the parts are really cool (sum types!), but there’s just so much stuff, and it’s so hard to understand what’s going on.

    * sigh *

    (sorry to flood you with text, I’m just thinking a lot about this these days)

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  • Sep 13, 2026, 1:26 PM

    @torb I don't mind at all! Gleam is also a language I am really enjoying and want to use more. I think it really manages to be very usable despite an almost ridiculously reduced feature set.

    I used to think Swift had a lot of potential, but the more I used it the more I realized what a strange language it is and not in a good way. Plus it's hamstrung by being owned by Apple unfortunately.

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  • Sep 13, 2026, 2:14 PM

    @krig Well, you know Bjarne-quote about there being a small beautiful language inside C++ trying to get out? I think something similar is true of Swift.

    Specifically: a lower than Java/JS/C#/etc but higher than C/C++/Rust/Zig/etc language focused on value semantics.

    Interestingly some of the ex-Swift people seems to be working on exactly that in the form of Hylo: hylo-lang.org

    But they don’t seem to get that much resources, so who knows if it’ll go anywhere.

    But It think that could be a sweet spot language wise for some domains.

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