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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I'm sure would result in a program that is unusable due to segfaulting all the time, with a reputation to match. In Rust, it instead just keeps running

In my experience, subpar C++ code that has issues such as the ones you mention but doesn't segfault most of the time is the rule, not the exception. Chromium or VSCode are full of this shit. And hobby projects like Ladybird would become shit too if they had to deal with real world complexity over time. Hell C++ itself is a huge mess. Rust's main argument is that at least now messes aren't full of easily preventable security problems and races.

I get the want to have strong crash signals, I run into this issue quite a bit in my work, but to be fair Rust critics also hand-wring about the existence and widespread use of unwrap when it's meant to create exactly the signal you are talking about here. There's no winning because no language is going to make subpar engineering good.

I'm really suspicious of the tendency that seems to be emerging to pass the buck of how terrible at its job Software Engineering has been to LLMs and blame them for all the slop, when really they're just reproducing the mounds of subpar code flesh and blood people wrote by the bushel. But if that's the direction things are going anyways, the natural fix is formal verification, and Rust was just a light step in that direction.