# Rust

2039 Hacker News commenters recommended Rust and 973 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 4 years (118 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for compile-time memory safety without runtime cost, fast native code, and strong types with pattern matching; critics cite complexity, slow compiles, a thin stdlib and dependency sprawl.

## Why people recommend it

- Memory safety without runtime cost (10 comments): "we've already gotten clearance from the relevant certification authorities that Rust is exempt from the restriction against dynamic allocation specifically because of its ownership system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46426203)) "Rust safe subset doesn't have UB. At all. So long as you never write the "unsafe" keyword you're fine, the compiler will check you are obeying all of the language rules at all times." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46440056)) "Rust's zero cost abstractions mainly stem from its affine ownership model managing memory lifetimes safely and correctly with zero cost - as that is the killer feature" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496665))
- Expressive types and pattern matching (7 comments): "it's genuinely a nice language. Maybe they're not the most brilliant of type theorists, but even without ownership/borrowing, just stuff like traits, structs/enums/unions with pattern matching, etc, is done quite well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071251)) "Rust is the most popular ML-derived language, so if some is considering Rust vs. some other language the chances are the other one they're considering does not have all the ML goodies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949328)) "Rust and both its restrictions and features (ie no OOP and prevalence of sum types and hence other goodies) makes approaching the implementation of big problems differently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47196835))
- High performance for systems code (4 comments): "if I needed to write a decent chunk of code that had to run as close to wire/CPU limits as possible and run across popular mobile and desktop platforms I would 100% reach for Rust" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46713641)) "our team finished migrating a couple of performance-sensitive services from C++ to Rust, and not only were they both successful, but they became 5x and 10x faster respectively" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141749)) "Rust shines in user-space systems-level applications (databases, cloud infrastructure, etc.) but definitely feels a bit out of place in more business-logic heavy applications." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47079284))
- Fewer bugs and vulnerabilities (4 comments): "Removing concurrence bugs is one of the main selling points for Rust. And algebraic types are a really boost for situations where you have lots of assumptions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545840)) "simply starting writing new code in Rust (rather than trying to rewrite existing codebases) quickly brings the number of found vulnerabilities down drastically" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612911)) "I've encountered a few soundness holes in rust-lang in practice, but they've all been fixed before I managed to shoot myself in the foot with any of them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052152))

## What people warn about

- High complexity and learning curve (4 comments): "Unifying surface features increases the combinatorics of interactions between traits, lifetimes, generics, specialization, and macros and leads to surprising edge cases." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47306229)) "the borrow checker and when you use lifetimes can be complex to learn, especially if you're coming from GC-land, just the language syntax isn't really that weird" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154887)) "My main additional issues are the high complexity, the syntax, the lack of stability, compilation times (and monomorphization), and lack of alternate implementations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514083))
- Thin stdlib, crate dependency sprawl (2 comments): "Rust is a great language, but the poor stdlib + overreliance on crates + explosion of unvetted transient dependencies makes it a hard sell for a lot of projects." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263271)) "I moved off Rust a few years back simply because I'm sick of the anemic stdlib and lack of mature ecosystem around anything even one inch off the beaten path." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659000))
- Poor fit for business/web apps (2 comments): "Rust shines in user-space systems-level applications (databases, cloud infrastructure, etc.) but definitely feels a bit out of place in more business-logic heavy applications." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47079284)) "Rust doesn't make sense for web development, any compiled language with automatic memory management, and value types, has much better tooling and ecosystem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085620))
- Slow compile and build times (3 comments): "Rust seems pretty popular with LLM users as well. The main challenge with languages like this is the performance hit you take running their build tools." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253988)) "My main additional issues are the high complexity, the syntax, the lack of stability, compilation times (and monomorphization), and lack of alternate implementations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514083)) "The aspects where I think Rust is worse are: compilation time, high complexity, less stable, only one implementation, no international standard, no proper ABI." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48937821))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend
- [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend
- [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend
- [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend
- [Java](https://hackerapproved.com/p/java.md): 553 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Rust", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).