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- Hacker News
- I'm happy for all developers programming in their favorite programming languages. Programming for over 30 years I have seen entire ecosystems come and go.
What I don't get is the burning need for Rust developers to insult others. Kind of the same vibes that we get from systemd folks and LP. Does it mean they have psychological issues and deep down in their heart they know they need to compensate?
I remember C vs Pascal flame back in the day but that wasn't serious. Like, at all. C/C++ developers today don't have any need to prove anything to anyone. It would be weird for a C developer to walk around and insult Rust devs, but the opposite is prevalent somehow.
by egorfine - Wouldn't it make sense to wait for (or support) one of the rust-for-GCC ports to become viable? As far as I understand, rust in the kernel won't become mandatory either until it's supported by GCC, and as a boon, with multiple implementations you can be more certain that the language won't move as fast and break things anymore. There's already upstream rust support in GCC, so I don't reckon it's that far off from being usable, at least for projects choosing to target it specifically.
Furthermore, if these architectures are removed from further debian updates now, is there any indication that, once there's a rust toolchain supporting them, getting them back into modern debian wouldn't be a bureaucratic nightmare?
by mid-kid - I really like to write programs in rust. But my stance has changed a bit over the years ever since other languages caught up a bit. On top of that I’m very skeptical if the rewrite of an ancient tool brings more less security. I don’t know the apt source code or how it actually works behind the cli interface so I leave this judgement to the pros. But there seems to be a very strong move to rewrite all core systems in rust. My issue with that is the fact that these tools don’t even invent anything new. Or change / improve the status co. I understand that it’s hard to introduce a new system without breaking other stuff. But our systems are still based on decisions from the telegraph age. Layers on top of layers on top of layers.by larusso
- I think polyglot causes more problems than it solves. It is gross how many different toolchains and package managers it now takes to build a distro. One person wants python, another wants node, another wants go, and now this. with node we traded buffer overflows for supply chain attacks. If they don’t want C, it would be better to start fresh. Robert Morris re-wrote enough of Linux in golang to be usable, and the overhead was something like 5-15% slower than C. If the goal is Rust everywhere, contribute to Redox. They are further along that road.by krautburglar
- I'm not sure if it's an insecurity thing or an immaturity thing, but when all these stories pop up, I always wonder why rust enthusiasts don't just prove their point by making their own "modern" and non-"retro" tech. If you can make something better, just do it already, and people will switch to it when they see the benefits. This parasitic "you must accept rust in your long-standing project" model is so off-putting, as is always evident by the complaints it causes. I love projects like Redox that try to do their own thing... why doesn't the rust community rally around projects like that and turn them into cve-free masterpieces that people will want to use?by richard_todd
- If anyone has a problem with the language used in the email, I would remind you that this is the same person who is maintainer for debian's keepassxc packages.
Here's a thread of them insulting upstream developers & users of the Debian packages. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10725
by cmm11 - One of the follow up messages is interesting: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html
> Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv).
Wonder what this means for those architectures then?
by justinclift - It's about time. Critical infrastructure still written in C - particularly code that parses data from untrusted sources - is technical debt that is only going to get worse over time. It's not as if Rust is that much more difficult to write than C. Rust is explicitly designed to be what you'd get if you were to re-create C knowing what we know now about language design and code safety.
If 32-bit x86 support can be dropped for pragmatic reasons, so can these architectures. If people really, really want to preserve these architectures as ongoing platforms for the future, they need to step up and create a backend for the Rust toolchain that supports them.
by lambdaone