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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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There is a nice culture war troll angle with some parts of the Rust programming language community being associated with leftist political drama. Rust is a popular safe language that solves most memory safety issues and some thread safety issues. I can see someone authoring a bait piece about taking my 'freedumb' to use C++ from my cold dead hands and forcing me to use communist Rust.

You will own no memory, and you will be happy.

No need for bait at all. Rust being associated with leftist political drama is sufficient reason to reject it.

Man.

It’s like you’re asking partisans to stake a claim on more of your stuff.

That's easy for people who don't write on bare metal for a living to say.

Alas, every single part of modern computing is involved with such characters, including every single alternative. C++ is no exception.

C++ is no exception

Actually it’s C which is no exceptions, necessitating the use of return codes to indicate success or error

That's easy for people who don't write on bare metal for a living to say.

I'm a C++ programmer. Not quite as "bare metal" as when I was doing embedded C (sprinkled with assembler) on machines too small for an OS, or occasionally writing microcode, but not one of those airy-fairy interpreted languages either.

C++ is no exception.

The C++ standards committee is not telling anyone that black lives are more important than whatever corner case DR is in play today. I'm sure its members are plenty pozzed and there's DEI initiatives in its general direction, but Rust is just worse. (With Go somewhere in the middle)

Apologies, fellow bit twiddler.

I don't know though, my latest trip to cppcon didn't exactly give me a different vibe from Rust conferences. And the latest Rust drama revolves around the core team telling community managers to fuck off with their coup attempts.

I would have agreed with you a few years ago when Rust had a bunch of literal tankies on staff, but a lot of those didn't go the distance (even Klabnik himself went away).

Nowadays it's a big managerial blob that is only different from the C++ one because it's staffed by younger people. That must have some moderating effects but in practice that whole side of the industry is converged to the max.

The rust subreddit is all californian ideology shitlibs all the time and much more ideologically moderated than most cpp forums though, I'll give you that. It is Reddit after all.

That said there's another side of it these days, lots of crypto projects use Rust and they are the ones hiring for actual jobs. Much to the chagrin of the aforementioned redditors. And the culture there ranges from standard lolberts to software-as-holy-war gigabased.