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(2025). This is by far the most perplexing part of this article for me: > People at Git has started to work on a proposal to make the Rust programming languag

(2025). This is by far the most perplexing part of this article for me: > People at Git has started to work on a proposal to make the Rust programming language mandatory. I don't like Rust and, above all, I don't like its community of little extremist characters who are trying to make everyone swallow their crap by rewriting projects that have been working for decades, doing social media brigading, and other nice little gems worthy of any tiny group with totalitarian delusions. That's why when I see that a project aims to "force" the use of or the switch from C to Rust, to the extent of my possibilities, I flee from it as if I were pursued by the Balrog of the Lord of the Rings with his whip. I've been programming for a longish time, and I've acquired my own set of opinions about programming languages, but I can't think of any that I dislike so strongly that I would need to boycott projects that use them under the hood. Moreover, even if we accept the "community of little extremist characters" claim for the sake of argument, is that at all relevant to the Git situation? I haven't seen any evidence that introducing Rust into the code base is the result of extremism, rather than just a mundane technology choice. Finally, when Rust is made "mandatory," it does not mean you must use Rust now, it just means that Rust is required to build the source code. The vast majority of people wouldn't even know that Rust was used. Even most Git developers wouldn't need to use Rust, since after more than a year from the original proposal, the Git source tree is still almost entirely written in C and shell scripts, and the amount of Rust code is basically a rounding error. The whole Rust issue seems like a big nothingburger, and this reaction seems completely irrational to me.

eviks 4d ago
When is a culture war even rational?
KPGv2 4d ago
Yeah I stopped reading at that point. Can't trust the reasoning anywhere else in an article once you run into that kind of stuff.
whateveracct 4d ago
the rust community is trash tho. such bad personalities all around. "mirrors" the issues with the nix community tbh..
- bigstrat2003 4d ago
  I agree that the rust community tends to be pretty toxic, but I don't think that is a good reason to avoid tools just because they use rust under the hood. You don't have to participate in the git dev community, let alone the rust community, to use git as your VCS.
  - sellmesoap 3d ago
    I think one thing about git needing rust (or python or Perl) is that each language dependency adds another good sized chunk of storage for the language and its tools/packager, I have a relatively light project using Tauri Svelte and code mirror, my build directory/cache becomes 18gb in the blink of an eye, that's a whole bloated modern operating system as a side effect of building a text editor, I should just wrap webkit-GTK around a redbean with some js libs in a directory, script the middleware in Lua and call it a day :D And don't get me wrong I like the development workflow with Tauri, it feels very performant, and easy to reason with, just the sheer disk space makes me boggle!
fmjrey 4d ago
Your arguments make sense but I also understand how the OP may have such allergic reaction. I also have seen my share of young devs claiming this new thing is the best thing since sliced bread and that everyone shoud use it. This may be a new language or a new feature like objects. After many slices of bread you may develop an allergy to such fanatics, and react with an opposing force to their eagerness to conquer the world.
- throwawayqqq11 4d ago
  Allergy is a poor analogy here, since it develops by not exposing yourself. I can understand your annoyance, i got bitten by hypes aswell, including rust. I am not regretting it so far.
socalgal2 4d ago
I agree with you. rust solves a real problem. It makes it much harder to create a large class of bugs, bugs that are in most C and C++ projects (and many other languages). Sure, maybe rusteans have bad attitudes. Not sure that's true but I do get the annoyance of "I re-wrote cat in rust!". We see these C/C++ bugs all over. Mozilla just fixed a ton of them, most of which would not have existed if Firefox was written in rust (see servo). That doesn't mean there would be zero bugs. It means there would be less. But by some accounts, a ton less, especially of the security issue kind. And it's not just about the op, the op being a perfect expert programmer who never writes bugs. It's about someone quits, someone who doesn't know the code as well and takes over, they quit, someone who knows the code even less takes over, and in that world, the person adding a new feature to the app/tool/library is far less likely to add a security bug to a rust repo than an C/C++ repo. > rewriting projects that have been working for decades They have been working for decades AND are full of security bugs! Switching them to rust generally means (1) the existing security bugs are gone (2) most future updates are far less likely to add new ones. Note: I'm not a rust programmer. I'm a C++ programmer dealing with the fact that there are so many UaF bugs in our code with > 1000 programmers. We know more will be added because C++ does not prevent them and we're not perfect. Rust does, or at least it prevents enough of them to be worth it.
- throwawayqqq11 4d ago
  I agree. The friction is not an issue of the language or of toxic communities but the culture of how software is crafted and passed on. I use rust for hobby projects and besides the savety and soundness decisions, i love the tooling. Having countless [0] very restrictive guard rails like deny(clippy::float_arithmetic) for your usecases codifies intent about project structure in a way i have seen nowhere else. Not engaging with the benefits of rust but instead blanket-dismiss projects based on unrelated issues is irrational and i suspect its a phenomenon of older generations that grew up with C and never inherited eg. cobol on mainframes. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy
sivers 4d ago
.. and even then there are other solutions like "GoT" - https://gameoftrees.org/ https://gameoftrees.org/ - which is interoperable with Git but written in that lovely OpenBSD C.
sellmesoap 4d ago
I believe there have been a number of crusades started around people's behavior and usually get a code of conduct book thrown at them. I remember a notable Python dev who had this happen to him, over sharing some humor from an old SNL skit related to a poorly chosen acronym for some tech, an otherwise extremely helpful and resourceful person got hammered and drumed out of the community. The rust community may have that same tone policing vibe. I enjoy and appreciate the value of using rust, and nix, both have this vibe at times and I make sure I "don't cross the streams" it sure has a stifling effect.
JuniperMesos 3d ago
I'm sympathetic to hostility towards many members of the Rust development community, many of whom are left-progressives who think it's politically and morally important to exclude and socially-punish people who they view as being insufficiently deferential towards communities they deem marginalized. But Rust is actually a better language than C, in multiple ways; and it is in fact bad that so much software in common use is still written in C. C is extremely hard to write correctly and hard to maintain; this fact explains a huge amount of security vulnerabilities in the widely-used software written in C. Rust mitigates this to a large extent, and is also just more pleasant to write because it has better syntactic and semantic affordances than C does - also better developer tooling. I think that people who are not Anglophone left-progressives should use Rust, in part because I think it is bad that a highly useful programming language is associated with Anglophone left-progressives. Certainly, regardless of one's non-programming-related political beliefs, you should not ground your identity in making a virtue out of sticking to C.

eviks 4d ago

When is a culture war even rational?

KPGv2 4d ago

Yeah I stopped reading at that point. Can't trust the reasoning anywhere else in an article once you run into that kind of stuff.

whateveracct 4d ago

the rust community is trash tho. such bad personalities all around. "mirrors" the issues with the nix community tbh..

bigstrat2003 4d ago
I agree that the rust community tends to be pretty toxic, but I don't think that is a good reason to avoid tools just because they use rust under the hood. You don't have to participate in the git dev community, let alone the rust community, to use git as your VCS.
- sellmesoap 3d ago
  I think one thing about git needing rust (or python or Perl) is that each language dependency adds another good sized chunk of storage for the language and its tools/packager, I have a relatively light project using Tauri Svelte and code mirror, my build directory/cache becomes 18gb in the blink of an eye, that's a whole bloated modern operating system as a side effect of building a text editor, I should just wrap webkit-GTK around a redbean with some js libs in a directory, script the middleware in Lua and call it a day :D And don't get me wrong I like the development workflow with Tauri, it feels very performant, and easy to reason with, just the sheer disk space makes me boggle!

fmjrey 4d ago

Your arguments make sense but I also understand how the OP may have such allergic reaction. I also have seen my share of young devs claiming this new thing is the best thing since sliced bread and that everyone shoud use it. This may be a new language or a new feature like objects. After many slices of bread you may develop an allergy to such fanatics, and react with an opposing force to their eagerness to conquer the world.

throwawayqqq11 4d ago
Allergy is a poor analogy here, since it develops by not exposing yourself. I can understand your annoyance, i got bitten by hypes aswell, including rust. I am not regretting it so far.

socalgal2 4d ago

I agree with you. rust solves a real problem. It makes it much harder to create a large class of bugs, bugs that are in most C and C++ projects (and many other languages). Sure, maybe rusteans have bad attitudes. Not sure that's true but I do get the annoyance of "I re-wrote cat in rust!". We see these C/C++ bugs all over. Mozilla just fixed a ton of them, most of which would not have existed if Firefox was written in rust (see servo). That doesn't mean there would be zero bugs. It means there would be less. But by some accounts, a ton less, especially of the security issue kind. And it's not just about the op, the op being a perfect expert programmer who never writes bugs. It's about someone quits, someone who doesn't know the code as well and takes over, they quit, someone who knows the code even less takes over, and in that world, the person adding a new feature to the app/tool/library is far less likely to add a security bug to a rust repo than an C/C++ repo. > rewriting projects that have been working for decades They have been working for decades AND are full of security bugs! Switching them to rust generally means (1) the existing security bugs are gone (2) most future updates are far less likely to add new ones. Note: I'm not a rust programmer. I'm a C++ programmer dealing with the fact that there are so many UaF bugs in our code with > 1000 programmers. We know more will be added because C++ does not prevent them and we're not perfect. Rust does, or at least it prevents enough of them to be worth it.

throwawayqqq11 4d ago
I agree. The friction is not an issue of the language or of toxic communities but the culture of how software is crafted and passed on. I use rust for hobby projects and besides the savety and soundness decisions, i love the tooling. Having countless [0] very restrictive guard rails like deny(clippy::float_arithmetic) for your usecases codifies intent about project structure in a way i have seen nowhere else. Not engaging with the benefits of rust but instead blanket-dismiss projects based on unrelated issues is irrational and i suspect its a phenomenon of older generations that grew up with C and never inherited eg. cobol on mainframes. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy

sivers 4d ago

.. and even then there are other solutions like "GoT" - https://gameoftrees.org/ https://gameoftrees.org/ - which is interoperable with Git but written in that lovely OpenBSD C.

sellmesoap 4d ago

I believe there have been a number of crusades started around people's behavior and usually get a code of conduct book thrown at them. I remember a notable Python dev who had this happen to him, over sharing some humor from an old SNL skit related to a poorly chosen acronym for some tech, an otherwise extremely helpful and resourceful person got hammered and drumed out of the community. The rust community may have that same tone policing vibe. I enjoy and appreciate the value of using rust, and nix, both have this vibe at times and I make sure I "don't cross the streams" it sure has a stifling effect.

JuniperMesos 3d ago

I'm sympathetic to hostility towards many members of the Rust development community, many of whom are left-progressives who think it's politically and morally important to exclude and socially-punish people who they view as being insufficiently deferential towards communities they deem marginalized. But Rust is actually a better language than C, in multiple ways; and it is in fact bad that so much software in common use is still written in C. C is extremely hard to write correctly and hard to maintain; this fact explains a huge amount of security vulnerabilities in the widely-used software written in C. Rust mitigates this to a large extent, and is also just more pleasant to write because it has better syntactic and semantic affordances than C does - also better developer tooling. I think that people who are not Anglophone left-progressives should use Rust, in part because I think it is bad that a highly useful programming language is associated with Anglophone left-progressives. Certainly, regardless of one's non-programming-related political beliefs, you should not ground your identity in making a virtue out of sticking to C.