I applaud the poster and responders here. I see this as healthy critical discussion. I don't interpret Peter bertoks comments as "pissed"; I see it more as intense, which I think is good that a program language should evoke intense feelings.
As someone who took to rust a few years ago, lost traction, and am now coming back to evaluate I very much appreciate discussions like these. When I evaluate a tech for adoption, which has impacts on the success of my business and my livelihood, I want to know what the warts are; downsides, issues; limitations of a language are far more important than features IMO.
Rust, unfortunately it seems, is now stuck with the "difficult" moniker that plagues Haskell; a sad psychology that creates learning anxiety in people before they even start. Studies on math anxiety have shown this is a real and lasting effect, causing measurable stress. Props to the rust community for taking "usability" head on.
As someone new to the community (and from the luxury of my vagabond status) I can report that I have had conversations with colleagues where they shared the sentiment that if both rust and c++ demand a high cognitive tax they'll just stick with c++. I find this unfortunate but both realistic and pragmatic. And by high cognitive tax I mean things commonly brought up about rust like fighting the borrow checker, type system, etc... , and things like inconsistent APIs (though I've got no real examples so maybe there is a large amount of FUD here...?).
I'm curious what are the pragmatic views/uses of rust? Id love to see examples a non-trivial AND pragmatic rust programs side by side with go and c++. Perhaps they are out there and I just need to look. I'd love to see rust advertised as a pragmatic solution to a class of problems. In my experience it would be a great balance to the well-known complexity. People who have never written or seen rust know it's complex and I'd like to pull out a pragmatic example and show them it's no worse than nodejs, go, etc.... IMO pragmatism trumps other inneficiencies and fringe quirks.
I'm still playing with rust and dedicated to learn as much as I can and I hope to find that it is the right tool to build my next project (fintech payment collections service using optical character recognition reading receipts and account summaries). To be frank, one reason for picking rust ( over go or c++) is the combination of generics, better guarantees for data races, memory, etc..., and a cleaner API and ecosystem (not really an issue with go).
I have a high tolerance for learning new things and am not afraid to pay people to do the same, if it means landing on superior tech. Part of superior tech is productivity, which I define relative to project and cost of failure. I'd rather spend an extra month(s) building something if that means it will require less maintenance, bugs, and errors over the course of time. I see rust as being able to provide that kind of productivity (versus deliver fast and spend months debugging). But I get concerned when people I know, who are polyglots and not averse to new things, eliminate rust due to complexity... And I can't help but wonder if that complexity is related to Peter bertoks general issues.
Thanks for all the work you do. I hope I'm not coming off too negative or as trying to create unnecessary anxiety or as telling experts how to do their job.