Yes, we know. We get it. Rust is not an absolute guarantee of safety and doesn’t protect us from all the bugs. This is obvious and well-known to anyone actually using Rust.
At this point, the argument feels like some sort of ideological debate happening outside the realm of actually getting work done. It feels like any time someone says that Rust defends against certain types of safety errors, someone feels obligated to pop out of the background and remind everyone that it doesn’t protect against every code safety issue.
That's not exactly the vibe I'm getting from the typical Rust fanboys popping up whenever there's another CVE caused by the usage of C or C++ though ;)
Rust does seem to attract the same sort of insufferable personalities that have been so typical for C++ in the past. Why that is, I have no idea.
If these people are insufferable to you, that I can't change your mind on. That said you might want to get used to it since major areas of industry are already considering C/C++ as deprecated (a paraphrasing from the Azure CTO recently)
The insufferable nature of the people isn't the advocating of safety. It's that Rust seems to have evolved a community of "X wouldn't have happened if Y was written in Rust!" and then walking away like they just transferred the one bit of knowledge everyone needed. They occupy less than 1% of the programming community and act like they single-handedly are the only people who understand correctness. It's this smug sense of superiority that is completely undeserved that makes the community insufferable. Not the safety "guarantees" of the language.
Maybe I’m too young (just past 30) but is it just me or is that some kind of attitude that emerged in the last 10-15 years?
And I mean not only in programming, but in general.
A small amount of people which is very vocal about something and start pushing everybody else to their thing while simultaneously shaming and/or making fun of those who either disagree or aren’t generally interested.
I kinda see a pattern here.
Either way, it’s very annoying.
Going back to the rust topic… I recently started working with some software written in a mix of C++ and Java. I don’t own the codebase, I “just” have to get it working and keep it working. So i had to reach to another person for some performance issues and this guy starts the usual “should be rewritten in rust” … jesus christ dude, I don’t care for your fanboyism right know, either help me or tell me you won’t so I’ll looks somewhere else.
And of course, if as an outsider this is the experience I have to go through every time I deal with rust people… I’ll try to minimise my exposure to such people (and to the language, if necessary).
It's called manufacturing consent and it's all around us.