---
title: I'm tired of this anti-Rust horseshit
unlisted: true
---

**This is not my, or hopefully anyone's, actual opinion.**
This is an adaptation of [Drew DeVault's thoughts on Wayland](https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.html) responding to [his thoughts on Rust](https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/09/Rust-move-fast-and-break-things.html) and [his "contributions" to the Python cryptography Rust flamewar](https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/5771#issuecomment-775972877).

What do anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers, and anti-Rust activism
all have in common? All of them are characterized by a blithe rejection of facts
to embrace a narrative of victimization by a vague authority. In the case of
Rust, the "vague authority" are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens
of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you.
"Rust sucks!" is a conspiracy theory with no basis in truth, and its
supporters have spent years harassing Rust maintainers, contributors, and
users. And it's time for it to fucking stop.

Maybe Rust doesn't work for your precious use-case. More likely, it *does*
work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have
been correct 7 years ago. Regardless, I simply don't give a shit about you
anymore. I've tried appealing to reason and rationally debunking each lie that
some Rust detractor flavor-of-the-week is touting to tow the party line, but
it didn't work. So my new approach is "fuck you". None of the Rust detractors
have a clue. They don't understand Rust, they don't understand C, they
don't understand memory safety or types or borrow checking or anything else in the
stack. They don't even understand what it's like to use Rust, because at most
they might have spent 5 minutes installing it, realized that something was
— gasp — *different* than C, and then uninstalled it and wrote
their angry Reddit comment.

It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers. It's not good for our
mental health. We're out here trying to make things better. Rust fixes
unfixable problems with C, and might have invented some new, fixable problems
in the process — most of which have been fucking fixed already, and years
ago! We've sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn
around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories,
then you're a fucking asshole.

If you really want to live in your propagandized world of Rust lies, then
fine. You're gonna maintain the C-based pyca/cryptography yourself, because we're not going to volunteer
our time, sacrifice our weekends and evenings staying up late for your sake,
just to maintain that broken pile of shit. You know what, if you fork it and
prove that you know what you're doing for a while, we'd probably just give you
the keys to upstream so you can maintain it yourself. If you do know what you're
doing, though, you'll soon realize you want nothing to do with that shitty
codebase.

Rust works for almost everyone, and works for *more* people than is even
possible with C. Most of the lies you've heard about ways that it's broken are
just that: lies. And if you insist on living in that fantasy, then keep it to
yourself, asshole.
