> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it.<p>This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.<p>I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).<p>I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.<p>I'm not a Rust contributor and I don't care for some of the challenges that come with Rust, but I love what it accomplished and I find it does it very well.
Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.
> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.<p>You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission here on HN for years.
> You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission<p>Which is what C++ enthusiasts have done to C enthusiasts and C enthusiasts have done to assembly enthusiasts.
If people would just take the time to <i>actually learn and appreciate</i> the Analytical Engine they could bypass _all_ that noise...
Now that LLMs are writing 300% of the code, it makes sense to do it in the safest language, not the most human friendly one.<p>I suspect that Rust will start taking over as a dominant LLM output language.<p>I also suspect that in short order we'll have entirely new languages that are engineered to be ideal languages for LLMs to generate. Perhaps even safer than Rust.<p>The models are shockingly good at writing Rust. You don't even need to have familiarity with Rust to start using it now. You'll learn the language as you interact with the LLMs.
Not trying to derail the discussion, but the reason for me to leave the Rust ecosystem in favor of Go was also the implied culture.<p>Experienced Go devs that stay inside the ecosystem try to write their libraries as "pure go" libraries with zero dependencies other than the upstream core libraries (or golang.org/x if needbe), which results in a very low maintenance ecosystem. This combined with the strong toolchain makes it joyful to work with.<p>I still don't agree with a lot of design choices of the language, but I realize that I can be more efficient if I am setting aside my opinion.<p>And that's exactly the thing that somehow never happened in the Rust ecosystem. I always joke that the Rust ecosystem has more OpenGL bindings than developers, because there's just so many low quality bindings or wrappers out there that the ecosystem in result got too noisy to maintain.<p>I don't want to write more (verbose) code. I want to write less.<p>I kind of already know that my comment goes to shit in terms of downvotes, but that's what I expect while writing this. How dare I criticized Rust as a language? How dare I, a fulltime noob, do this? Rust is better, always!<p>...the Rust ecosystem is just so effing toxic. I am glad that I left it, because I just got tired of being angry at random online things all the time. Go is a happy place where my annoyances are reduced to Cgo and the unsafe package <3
The entire concept of publicity as a competition is baffling to me. Who gives a shit?
Seriously. Yesterday there was a thread about a use-after-free bug in OpenBSD and despite BSD predating Rust by decades there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust (as though Rust would even protect you from all memory errors in a kernel project where you'd inevitably need to write unsafe Rust anyways!). Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.
You have an awful low bar for what is considered chiding, damn<p>Then again, your very username implies an indulgence in viewing technology through the lens of fandoms which is... weird
I read the comment that they were referring to and it wasn't even constructive conversation in the thread.<p>It was basically a complete derail to backdoor in a conversation about why they think everything should be in Rust.<p>OpenBSD still uses CVS, C and Make because that's what works for them. They will continue to keep using C, Make and CVS but that enables them to be productive with the contributors that they have. Moving things to other languages will not increase their productivity. That's the biggest thing that the largely-fanatical Rust evangelists completely fail to understand.
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> there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust<p>Please provide a link to this comment.<p>Someone asked an honest question and got reasonable responses that were informative. At no point did anyone chide the project for not using Rust.<p>> Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.<p>Nah, people complaining about the supposed toxic community are noisier than the supposed toxic community.
> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.<p>Then why is it weird if you're saying the same thing? Different programming languages appeal to programmers with different tastes, and so it makes sense that some programmers would be drawn to language X and dislike language Y, while others would be the opposite.
Maybe it's even the other way around: different cultures and tastes give birth to different languages and community norms around them.
This is a good take. I was interested in accomplishing my goals and had an interest in both Rust and Zig. Going in, Rust was already proven to meet my needs and I was exploring Zig. Everything being centered around anti-Rust and “better than Rust” without meeting my needs made it a non-starter, it got in the way of discussing the languages themselves.
When was this? I've only seen this "anti-rust" vibe in the past few weeks, guess triggered by the Bun rewrite. Zig people usually will tell you to use the right tool for the job over shilling the language or that you don't need to use it yet (if you want a stable language/documentation) the language will be there if you want to check it in a few years.
I have definitely witnessed very specific cultures around languages I really like that I generally just don't vibe with. The author creates something brilliant, but there's a cadre of early adopters that shape a political and somewhat egotistical community that rubs me wrong. Once I spot them, I don't engage with the community. And it's not even that I disagree with the politics they espouse... I'm usually on the same page, but it's just kind of exhausting and a little over the top.<p>I'm old-ish though and grew up apolitical, so I'm sure it's just a me problem.
In the case of Ruby, the contrast between the early community pre-Rails and what came after is astounding. Partly comes down to the personality differences between Matz and DHH, I guess. I loved the community pre-2005 and had no interest in engaging with it afterward (although I used Rails for a few personal projects).
The year is 2026 and the only thing about coding that matters anymore is taste.<p>Edit: Thought about scare quoting “taste”
Pretty sure you could have said the same in 1986 and I know for sure you could have in 2006. Not sure why you think people having different tastes is new.
It's not necessarily the thing that matters most to executives, who are often those making decisions, but it's always been the thing that mattered most to programmers (at least those of them who have any emotions or strong preferences toward programming languages).
Always have been. When something is your primary tool, you develop strong opinion about it. Code is notation, helping to describe solutions. Not everyone thinks and solve the same way, so strong preferences is not unusual.
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I feel this way about most Hashi tools, they just seem massively overrated to me.<p>Ghostty is fine I guess, I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features.<p>Zig is fine, has some cool stuff, the community seems roughly the same as the rust, with again just way less features.<p>The rest of the hashi tools are fine, I don’t really use any of them anymore. Vault was a big deal at some point I guess
Vault can seem niche however it’s used a lot in high assurance environments given it is easily integrated with Thales HSMs and has FIPS compliance
That's so dismissive, the HashiCorp products were a game changer in a world that had very little, Vault and Terraform are super widely used
i was an early vagrant user, a long time tf user, and 3 year nomad/consul user. but have moved on. cf now for aws & gcloud cli in scripts for gcp. and eks/gke instead of nomad.
I’ve worked with people who I appreciate for their unapologetic willingness to be who they are. I might not agree with their opinions and think they’re a little extreme, but I’m glad people like them exist and enjoy seeing what they devote their time to. Based on the rest of Mitchell’s response, I think something like that is what is appreciated about Zig.<p>I don’t use Zig, and frequently use Rust, but I’ve never really interacted with the core development team for either. I don’t think it’s necessary to care about whatever culture is driving development once it has sufficient velocity. The Rust I use today is more than enough for my needs. Maybe if I were more involved in open source I would better understand why culture matters, but unfortunately I’m mostly a consumer of it, not a producer.
It feels like Zig is trying to be more like C, and Rust is trying to fill a C++ slot. I wish someone would have made something in between, or that the industry would have adopted D more, it certainly didn't help that their compiler was proprietary for so long, and then they rewrote their STD lib. D to me is one language I love fundamentally, but the ecosystem is nowhere near where it could be.
Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? I’ve seen so many dogmatic views of those Rust apostles here on HN and Linked who think Rust is the only valuable language and all the others - Python, Go, C++ (of course) - are rubbish. I am so fed up with those snobbish views of a few Rust lovers and as much as I love the language I want to avoid those ignorant fucks.
Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress throughout all of technology.
You could just have left off the last part of that :D<p>> Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress
It seems to hinge a lot on what is “culture”.
Why does liking something different from you imply there's a war?
There is often a neo-tribalistic mentality.<p>"My tribe is better than your tribe"<p>Some people thrive inside this mentality, whole others don't go near it.<p>Not everyone is thinking like this but a lot of people do. So because of that it's a common heuristic to think of it as "war" because there are some people who do that gladly.
It doesn't and I never said anything about preferences directly. There are however culture wars, and they cause problems throughout the industry and discipline.
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> Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.<p>In hindsight (and at risk of starting a flame war), it's easier to be magnanimous when you are winning/have won.
Is it a competition? I wonder if the Zig people feel as though it is, because I doubt the Rust people do.<p>Rust's big tentpole is "no memory management bugs, everything must be provably safe", whereas Zig is very proud of "no memory management, you have full control but you have to exercise it". I don't feel as though these are competing for the same audience or mindshare.<p>I've used Zig a big (while trying to contribute to ghostty, at least), and it's an interesting language that I like the aesthetics of but I don't want to use. I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).
> I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).<p>I share your complaints about the tools you came to Rust from, but the philosophy of not letting you go off script is great until it doesn't work for you. A lot of the reason some of us use the more flexible languages is because we've been in situations where a language and its ecosystem either won't let you do something outright or not without significant pain. Often when everything is on fire and your customers are cancelling contracts. You can't afford to wait for the core team or community to come in and save you in these situations.<p>Having access to work around your problems is also the source of a lot of the pain you're talking about, but at least you get to stay in business to solve that problem tomorrow.<p>To a very large degree, a lot of the Rust evangelists that I encounter in the wild are either hobbyists, academics or paid open source contributors at large companies. Most of the discussions I've seen wrt Rust at companies with actual deliverables stop at "Rust? Absolutely not.". Except for a very narrow set of systems where you want the kind of guarantees that Rust provides as a primary feature. For more general situations, the tradeoffs often aren't worth it.
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I write rust and barely interact with the community. I used to. I spoke at the first rustconf, even. I don't really care to engage with the rust community anymore (I cut myself off entirely from most online communities tbh).<p>I might stay away from a particularly toxic community or one with wildly different values, but I don't really get why you wouldn't write Rust just because of how some people post about it. Odd tbh. I find the whole thing about "oh the rust zealots" hand wringing stuff so silly, really.
This is weird to me too, especially to say in the present tense in 2026.<p>I think I get the point about "Rust culture" (although it's too vague to agree or disagree with, probably on purpose).<p>But in 2026, Rust is fully a commodity language, and especially to compare it to Zig in this angle is bizarre. Even turning my stereotypes to 11 and thinking back to when I worked with a team developing Rust professionally in 2021, I'd say we got mostly ended up hiring "proglang enthusiasts" and not "Rust people." In terms of "cultural dilution" alone Zig is orders of magnitude more culty than Rust because that many fewer people use it.
I think you'll find that out of all the pairwise combinations of language communities, there's one that stands out as having beef with a bunch of other ones. And that's not true of e.g. Haskell and OCaml (or to nothing like the same degree), so it's not just about competition for mindshare, it's about an approach to competition for mindshare.<p>The C++ community and the Zig community seem to get along fine, so it not about looking up at the entrenched thing or down at the new thing, many orders of magnitude there and no drama.<p>Python, R, and Julia folks all seem to get along.<p>On the frontend there are a zillion things that compile to JS and even in the big camp the frameworks are split 9 ways, you get a little heat here and there over Vercel throwing big bucks or something but it's rare, generally the Svelte people and the Astro people seem to not mind when the other one front pages or whatever.<p>Rust is at war with the world. Maybe it can even win but it's a weird road to walk by choice.
Kind of tangential to the man Rust v. Zig culture debate but:<p>> I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements).<p>Kind of reeks of unreasonable expectations to me. I don't think one should expect language designers to redesign a language or introduce new features that would likely be poor fits with the overall existing language philosophy (the design and usage philosophies behind Rust and Zig are practically opposite poles). Language stewards have a responsibility to everyone in their existing user base and they have a responsibility to evolve the language in a ways that's consistent with the expectations they already established (if they want to keep their users that is). Expecting the designers to rework the language to bolt on features from some <i>other language</i> just for your project is kind of absurd. I think Loris's supposed response is actually correct here and probably the best response he could give, without knowing more about precisely what the requests were, how willing you were to contribute work yourself, etc.
<i>I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years.</i><p>Oh, please...if you haven't noticed the carpet bombing of rust advocacy on HN for more than 4 years and still in progress, you're deliberately not paying attention.
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> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig<p>The Zig Evangelism Task Force has supplanted Rust as the premier hypebeast. And they'll be supplanted by the NEXT BIG THING.