I’ve been using Rust for a while, and I’m so, so tired of hearing this argument.

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.

It's really weird.

I keep seeing claims that Rust users are insufferable and claim that Rust protects against everything. But, as someone who has started using Rust around 0.4, I have never seen these insufferable users.

I imagine that they lurk on some communities?

Okay, just to fact check this. I am a fan of Rust, but pretending there aren't these aggressive rust users is a bit putting your head in the sand.

Like any language that has very cool features, there are people that take that tool as not a tool but a religion.

You can even look in my comment history and see people arguing with me when I say I was a rust fan, but memory safety isn't a requirement in some areas of programming. One person made it there mission to convince me that can't possibly be the case and in (in my example of video games) that any memory bug crashes and game and will make users quit and leave.

I, too, have not encountered these toxic Rust fanboys. I don't believe my head is in the sand. I do regularly see people degrading Rust and it's community, and so am convinced these toxic Rust fanboys are largely a myth based on uncharitable interpretations of otherwise reasonable statements. I think people often read "I advocate for the deprecation of all C/C++ codebases" into the statement "Rust is a 'safe' language, for a certain meaning of that term," but I don't think it's actually common to advocate for such a deprecation outside of security-critical applications.

I feel like it's a defensive reaction, that people feel like Rust is seeking to obviate arcane skills they've built over the course of their careers. Which I don't think is true, I think there will always be a need for such skills and that Rust has no mission to disrupt other language communities, but I can understand the reaction.

> You can even look in my comment history

Is this the thread you're referring to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878868

Because I genuinely don't see what you're talking about. No one seems to "make it their mission" and no one seems to be arguing for Rust in particular, as much as this category of languages.

If you need an example of the rust community being toxic, I give you https://github.com/actix/actix-web

Look up the history and realize they bullied an open source project leader into leaving open source for good.