Rust Blog Touts 'What We Achieved' in 2017 (rust-lang.org)

An anonymous reader quotes the official Rust blog: Rust's development in 2017 fit into a single overarching theme: increasing productivity, especially for newcomers to Rust. From tooling to libraries to documentation to the core language, we wanted to make it easier to get things done with Rust. That desire led to a roadmap for the year, setting out 8 high-level objectives that would guide the work of the team. How'd we do? Really, really well.
Aaron Turon, part of the core developer team for Rust, wrote the blog post, and specifically touts this year's progress on lowering the learning curve with books and curriculum, as well as actual improvements in the language and a faster edit-compile-debug cycle. He also notes new support for Rust in IntelliJ and Atom (as well as preview versions for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code) in 2017 -- and most importantly, mentoring. I'd like to specifically call out the leaders and mentors who have helped orchestrate our 2017 work. Leadership of this kind -- where you are working to enable others -- is hard work and not recognized enough. So let's hand it to these folks...! Technical leaders are an essential ingredient for our success, and I hope in 2018 we can continue to grow our leadership pool, and get even more done -- together.

Comments

Is the Rust community still toxic like I found it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked into using Rust a little while ago. On the surface it sounded appealing. It sounded like it would give me a lot of what C++ offers, but without some of the headaches that C++ suffers from.

To keep a long story short, Rust, as a language, did not meet my expectations. The syntax is C-like, but it's also quirky in some ways. The performance was mediocre. The borrow-checking approach to memory management is a pain in the bottom in practice, even after you understand it and have worked with it. There was only one compiler implementation, and I found it to be buggy and slow, even compared to a slow C++ compiler like GCC. The standard library was pretty bad, and the string handling was atrocious. Third-party libraries often didn't compile, and many were woefully incomplete. It was a really bad experience.

But the worst part, in my opinion, was the Rust community. I've dealt with a lot of programming language communities over the decades, but Rust's was by far the worst I've ever experienced.

The whole Rust Code of Conduct thing is kind of weird. I mean, programming language communities got along just fine without codes of conduct for ages. At first I though it was just a symbolic thing, but I soon realized that the Rust Code of Conduct was much more than that. I'd classify it more as a religious text, or even a behavioral script. It was like the Rust community worshiped it. In my experience it turned what should have been friendly discussion among collaborating colleagues into a highly controlled, flow-chart-like, courtroom-like, overly-formal, totally-artificial, robotic-like ritual. You literally had to walk on eggshells the whole time, out of fear of accidentally violating the Rust Code of Conduct in some obscure and non-obvious way.

The Rust Code of Conduct itself is contradictory. For example, there's a paragraph that says, "we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people", yet that same paragraph starts with, "We will exclude you from interaction if ...". They basically would be violating their own Rust Code of Conduct when they try to uphold it!

I later found out that they even have a Rust Moderation Team that goes around and enforces the Rust Code of Conduct! I can't think of any other programming language community that I've dealt with that has a formally organized hit squad whose sole purpose is to take out community members who are deemed to be "undesirable". It's absurd. It's really, really absurd.

Something else I found disturbing was the extreme leftism that permeated the community. Now I don't think that programming and politics really need to mix much. They're pretty separate, for the most part. But in my experience the Rust community was very heavily into promoting "diversity" and "tolerance" and all of those other left-wing buzzwords, even when they really had nothing to do with programming. It's like they're more focused on "social justice" than they are on creating a usable programming language.

Another thing that bothered me was the smugness I kept encountering from Rust's contributors and supporters. They kept portraying Rust as being this great savior, when in my opinion it's rather mediocre, and actually has some pretty serious flaws and problems. If you questioned these Rust supporters, they would basically belittle and insult you, assuming they didn't try to censor you through down-modding or banning, if the discussion venue supported such things. I found it strange how they often ridiculed C++, yet when it came to the same functionality or features Rust was often much worse than C++.

I've been programming for a long time, and I've used a lot of different programming languages, but my experience with Rust was perhaps the worst I've ever experienced. No programming language has left me more disappointed, and no programming language community has ever left me feeling more weirded out. In my o

Re:Lack of diversity in the Rust community is weir

[gbjbaanb]

Its a sickness of mind that has afflicted some people.

An example: a while back there was a shop opening in part of London called"Best of British" that sold British tat that appealed to tourists mainly, nothing particularly extraordinary.,

It was in the news because some people were complaining that the place was racist. The interviewed shop-owner told that middle class white people would come into the shop and shout abuse at him. He also told that foreign people would come into the shop and tell him how happy they were that such a place existed (as I suppose they wanted to buy the kind of tourist tat he stocked).

So the people complaining about racism nowadays are not coloured/black/whatever they're called this week, but a certain type of "virtue-signalling" fools who have taken on this stuff as a battle to be fought on others behalf. I think its just that once they wage class war against the rich, found themselves to be the rich and so changed their focus to "rich racists" instead so they could continue to "fight the system" whilst pretending they weren't part of it. Its all a bit sad really.