Finally, some legitimate critique of Rust, that does not revolve around “DEI bad” or “memory safety bad”!

Both can be criticized within reason. Yes, there’s that infamous Rust dev, who likes to sabotage projects she’s involved with the moment things don’t go the way she wants it, thinks the word “cancer” is somehow a slur, and of course loves to send her followers after people for various reasons, often while purposefully misinterpreting people’s words. All while spreading either the evopsych “extreme female brain theory of borderline personality disorder” nonsense, or the “cluster B abuse” nonsense made up by far-right theologists masquerading as psychologists to explain trans people on the terms of christian fundamentalism and without allowing them to live life as they want. This (nor other similarly bad Rust devs, nor callout culture in general, nor other things like the whole “master” branch fiasco with Github) does not mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, like Brian Lunduke and other far-right adjacent people want us to do, all while pretending their position is the “centist” one, because “real fascists did those things for the sake of pure evil, but we have good reasons to do those very same things, like crime statistics and IQ tests”.

Same with memory safety. We usually get the “skill issue” type of critique, meaning “just write better code”. I personally prefer D’s approach to memory safety with its multi-level solution alongside with the much nicer code for the unsafe stuff. And I guess Rust also have something similar to D’s --noboundscheck compiler flag as a way to disable boundschecks in times it’s needed.

This all creates a situation I’ve first seen unfolding during the whole gamergate culture war fiasco. Thanks to burnt out atheist YouTubers making bad faith critique of Anita Sarkeesian’s videos lead to the rebrand of Morality in Media to NCOSE and the formation of Collective Shout, which ultimately lead to the whole payment processor censorship issue. Thanks to alt-right chuds constantly misgendering and sending death threats to Brianna Wu enabled a racist abuser to hide within our circles. And thanks to chud developers wanting to “give real treatment to gender confused people” and wanting to “gatekeep” software development from newbies, actual critiques of the Rust language, such as a heavily OCaml-influenced language being sold as a C replacement (if not a C++ replacement - all without true built-in OOP support), or the fact a functional programming language is being sold as a general purpose language, all because “you can opt out” (Java also technically allows you to opt-out from most OOP features).