Sami Tikkanen Explains Rust Language and Its Goals
It's now been about five years since I heard about the Rust programming language for the first time. It was when I was starting to write an operating system in C and the "Rust people" (as they seem to often refer to themselves, which should already be a red flag) told me that I should write it in Rust. (Later, they have several times told me to *re*write it in Rust.) Rust is "memory safe", which in the context of Rust means that the whole language is designed in such way that it is impossible to have memory-related bugs in programs that are written in Rust.
The concept of memory safety sounded interesting. Everyone who writes in C knows that it is very easy - especially for a newbie programmer - to have things like buffer overflows and invalid pointer dereferences in their code. It happens because computers are inherently memory-unsafe and C is a low level language of which primary purpose is to represent the low-level working logic of the computer in the most human-readable way possible. Memory-safety was not very high on the priority list when the C language was developed.
Most modern C compilers have some compile-time checks to detect the most obvious newbie mistakes with arrays, but the code still compiles normally. Memory bugs can be very difficult and time-consuming to debug - especially without a CPU that supports hardware watchpoints and modern debugging tools like Valgrind - and they can cause a very chaotic program behaviour where it sometimes crashes in seemingly random situations or even just does something weird and then recovers and starts working normally again.
Traditionally, most memory-safe languages are interpreted or jit-compiled scripting languages. Compared to native code they are slow and inefficient, and because of their nature as an interpreted language, they cannot be used to write operating systems or any code whatsoever that directly interfaces with the hardware. Rust, however, is compiled to machine code - just like C - and claims to produce just as efficient binaries. Naturally I was interested and decided that maybe I should learn some Rust.
The first thing that I noticed back then was that the Rust language was constantly changing. Even the most basic programming tutorials were hard to find and they usually had a small print somewhere, saying that this tutorial is outdated and with modern Rust it should be made in some other way. I don't want to learn something that does not last - that feels like a wasted time when I could also learn skills that remain usable to the far future. The time that is used to re-learn different versions of the same old skills could be used to create some actual things with the one, only and persistent versions of those skills. In the end I noticed that the official Rust compiler didn't even support my target platforms, so I lost interest in learning it. That was long before I even noticed how disgusting people many Rust programmers are.
If you go to the website of the Rust programming language nowadays, one of the first things you'll notice is that their primary communication platform is Discord. Yes, you read it right - their primary communication platform is Discord, a proprietary spyware program that is owned by a Chinese investment company and has backdoors to various other national intelligence agencies too. I cannot go to their Discord channel because my computer's architecture is not supported by Discord. (And by having any critical opinions, I would probably be banned from there anyway.)
Another thing that you notice immediately if you use an independent web browser is that their developer forum does not work. If you use a "non-supported" browser, or have JavaScript disabled, the webpage body has a CSS property "overflow-y: hidden !important;" which prevents the user from scrolling the page. On top of the page there is a banner that tells you to download one of the "supported browsers", which are Firefox, Chrome and Safari. That CSS property is relatively easy to get rid of on most browsers, but just putting it there is a huge red flag.
Which leads me to the next point. Rust people are clearly hostile towards or generally against free software.
The maintainers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution are now rewriting GNU Coreutils in Rust. Instead of using the GPLv3 license, which is designed to make sure that the freedoms and rights of the user of the program are preserved and always respected over everything else, the new version is going to be released using the very permissible or "permissive" (non-reciprocal) MIT license, which allows creating proprietary closed-source forks of the program.
There will surely be small incompatibilities - either intentional or accidental - between the Rust rewrite of coreutils and the GNU/C version. If the Rust version becomes popular - and it probably will, if Ubuntu starts using it - the Rust people will start pushing their own versions of higher level programs that are only compatible with the Rust version of coreutils. They will most probably also spam commits to already existing programs making them incompatible with the GNU/C version of coreutils. That way either everyone will be forced into using the MIT-licensed Rust version of coreutils, or the Linux userland becomes even more broken than it already is because now we have again two incompatible sets of runtime functions that conflict with one another. Either way, both outcomes benefit the corporations that produce proprietary software.
I agree that both the "everything must be GPL" people and the "everything must be Rust" people can be annoying, but those GPL people at least have very different core principles than the Rust people. The latter are authoritarians who think that everyone must use the computer the same way as they do, whereas one of the very basic principles of GNU software - and free software in general - is that everyone is also free to not use them.
Because those who identify as the Rust people have authoritarian mindsets, they see everyone who uses a computer (or any other technical device) differently than they do, as an enemy. Their goal is to force everyone into using their rewritten versions of programs. Their compiler still cannot even generate code to x86 CPUs without the SSE2 instructions, which has made it impossible to browse the web on x86 machines older than Pentium 4, even though they would easily have more than enough calculating power for doing it. The maintainers of the compiler have stated that they will not fix it, because for Rust people this is not a problem - anyone who tries to browse the web on a Pentium III is just using a computer wrong and should just throw that computer away and buy a new one. And did I already mention that these Rust people are always the same who also call themselves environmentalists? I see a contradiction.
For some reason the whole discussion around this Rust/C/Linux/GNU/thing is mostly focused around superficial and irrelevant things like the sexualities and genders of the Rust people, and the more important things are being mostly ignored. It almost gives the impression that the critics are also being controlled by the same people who want to replace everything with Rust.
Rust's licensing is also problematic. The license has been worded in such a vague way that it may or may not allow forking or re-implementation. It may or may not require deleting all references to the word "rust" from a fork or re-implementation. At this moment the official truth is that forking is allowed, but the wording in the license is not going to be fixed. The Rust people act like people who are concerned about the license are just pretending to be concerned because they have some ulterior political motives.
Like most programmers whose primary goal is to rewrite something, Rust people are also not only authoritarians, but also corporationists. They are not able to innovate anything new, so to demonstrate their skills, they rewrite existing software to have some significant accomplishments on their CV. Reimplementing things is also easier than fixing someone else's code, but the end result is usually new code that is even more broken than the old version. They specifically target popular, widely used and well-known free software - those are the high-value targets for them. When they have something that looks good on the CV and get a good paying job, they mostly leave the free software world and start working for corporations. This is why the Linux desktop is, still, a mess - after 35 years of development and several rewrites of the most used desktop environments. Now even the windowing system itself is being re-implemented.
Rust people seem to be focused mostly on identity politics and dividing people into groups that are then supposed to fight each other. As I wrote earlier, I didn't invent the term "Rust people" myself - those people themselves identify as "Rust people", which is not a good thing. I code mostly in C and assembly, but I certainly don't identify as a "C person". I can also write other programming languages, and I would even learn Rust if it wasn't such a horrible Trojan horse that is clearly designed to destroy computing freedom.
Rust people rejoice every time when a new part of the Linux kernel gets "rusted", also destroying the portability of the rewritten part in the process. They write online articles and make YouTube videos full of hype about it. Then they move to rewriting the next part. It is very clear that their goal is to progressively take over the whole Linux kernel and every project associated with it, which is a very bad thing, considering how authoritarian and hostile towards the GPL license they are.
It should be noted that the Rust language is being developed by the Mozilla Foundation, which is the same organization that is presently turning Firefox into a spyware monster that sends all data about its users somewhere to train "AI". █