Rust

What hackers pick instead

• GoLiked for its simple, readable style, easy goroutine concurrency, strong standard library and good performance; critics say it ignored prior language design, added generics late and lacks sum types.1254recommend
• PythonPython is recommended for its huge library ecosystem, readable pseudo-code-like syntax and fast productivity on scripts and small programs; critics cite slow performance, dynamic-typing pain and dependency conflicts.1067recommend
• ZigA low-level C replacement praised for comptime metaprogramming, explicit allocators and helpful safety checks, though critics say it lacks Rust's memory-safety guarantees and leaves footguns.743recommend
• TypeScriptAn expressive type system over JavaScript that catches bugs, shares code between frontend and backend and helps LLMs write better code, though escape hatches and compile-time-only types weaken its guarantees.574recommend
• JavaRecommended for strong runtime performance, a huge mature ecosystem and stable, well-signposted upgrades; critics cite slow startup, memory footprint and awkward, bolted-on language features.553recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 6131 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker”

2. 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

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Static Allocation with Zig”

3. 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.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust”

4. 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.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “No strcpy either”

5. 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

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “AdGuard VPN protocol goes open-source – meet TrustTunnel”

6. 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

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI”

7. 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.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Farewell Rust”

8. 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

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Rust Is Just a Tool”

9. Unifying surface features increases the combinatorics of interactions between traits, lifetimes, generics, specialization, and macros and leads to surprising edge cases.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “A Grand Vision for Rust”

10. 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

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Automated QA and Testing with AI”

11. What's interesting is your code example is solved in Rust. By preventing a reference and a mutable reference all of the sudden the code becomes easier to reason about.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Rust–: Rust without the borrow checker”

12. Rust's hypothesis that unsafe code can be successfully encapsulated behind safe APIs suitable for the vast majority of uses has been experimentally proven in practice.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Bugs Rust Won't Catch”

13. Rust's rules around memory ownership, aliasing, and mutability are what allow the language to provide deterministic compile time memory safety without runtime cost.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Fil-Qt: A Qt Base build with Fil-C experience”

14. A great deal of Rust code need not ever involve the unsafe block, and in these cases there is no great temptation to stray off this path. This is pretty good, imo.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker”

15. It's something that imposes strict constraints which enables professional programmers to improve the correctness of their software without sacrificing performance

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Memory Safety”

16. 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

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig”

17. 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.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Migrating from Go to Rust”

18. Rust's pattern matching, an innovation among systems languages without GCs, may matter more regarding correctness and reliability than its famous borrow checker.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]”

19. Here Option and str (string views) were in the standard library from the beginning, and every library and application uses them as fundamental vocabulary types.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Everything old is new again: memory optimization”

20. 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.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20”

21. simply starting writing new code in Rust (rather than trying to rewrite existing codebases) quickly brings the number of found vulnerabilities down drastically

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Significant Raise of Reports”

22. Rust doesn't make sense for web development, any compiled language with automatic memory management, and value types, has much better tooling and ecosystem.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Farewell Rust”

23. 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

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Fil-C: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out – Filip Pizlo – SSW 2026 [video]”

24. It has most of the features that enable safe, correct code without being anal about immutability and laziness that make performance difficult to predict.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ladybird Browser adopts Rust”

25. 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.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “What's the best programming language for coding agents?”

26. The borrow checker and all the other type safety features, as well as features like send/sync are all about not giving you rope to hang yourself with.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig”

27. My main additional issues are the high complexity, the syntax, the lack of stability, compilation times (and monomorphization), and lack of alternate implementations.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “C Is Best”

28. The aspects where I think Rust is worse are: compilation time, high complexity, less stable, only one implementation, no international standard, no proper ABI.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU”

29. 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.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft”

30. This is very big news, all major OS vendors that also have a role in C and C++ language tooling, now have diversified their options in systems programming languages for greenfield development.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft”

31. the LLM makes up for the fact that rust is less ergonomic, and being able to pull parts of my project out into libraries that can be called from any language is a rust superpower

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “What's the best programming language for coding agents?”

32. I find it to be a feature, not a bug, that Rust is inherently hostile to companies whose business models rely on tossing closed-source proprietary blobs over the wall

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed”

33. "We shouldn't use the thing that has memory safety built in because it also has a thriving ecosystem of open source dependencies available" is a very weird argument.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Supply chain attacks are exploiting our assumptions”

34. Rust can only prove a limited subset of correct programs to be safe, when you're doing bare metal stuff you've often not in that subsystem and drop down to unsafe.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Dav2d”

35. Rust is absolutely not perfect with this though since any downstream function may panic!() without any indication from its function signature that it could do so.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “The Compiler Is Your Best Friend, Stop Lying to It”

36. Rust has a much better initial state, but the rules evolving the system (the governance model, the kinds of developers that work on it, etc.) are the same as C++

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “C++26: Std:Is_within_lifetime”

37. The state-machine transformation inside rustc is a thing of beauty, but the libraries and APIs layered on top of that should have been iterated many more times

    Mixed · Nov 2025

38. Combined with the ability to compile to a single native binary, having a solid package management solution, and a solid selection of nice language features.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Memory Safety Absolutists”

39. CLI is a great way to model problems. When I find myself doing something that has graduated beyond a comfortable amount of PowerShell, Rust is there for me.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “A Grand Vision for Rust”

40. Your own misunderstandings of rust stable vs nightly and editions and using an unofficial installation method for a toolchain are not Rust's shortcomings.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Is Rust faster than C?”