The problem with many C programmers is they tend to abbreviate identifiers in code that they write, which have neither of those properties. It really slows down reading code.

It's actually even worse for hardware (SystemVerilog) developers. For some reason they have to abbreviate everything as much as humanly possible. In some cases it is acceptable (clk/rst for clock/reset) again because it's standard and common. But often you'll end up with nonsense like `dma_ctn_tlul_rsp_intg_err`. Good luck figuring that out if you don't know all the acronyms (it's DMA ConTrol Network ReSPonse INTeGrity ERRor). Obviously you don't need `dma_control_network_response_integrity_error` but there's a middle ground (probably e.g. `dma_control_resp_integrity_err`). (And sorry to pick on OpenTitan; their code isn't actually as bad for this as some of the closed source stuff I've seen.)

The Bun team did an experiment to have an LLM transliterate the codebase to Rust and then iterate on turning it into idiomatic Rust. They were losing a lot of time dealing with memory management problems and wanted to move to a language with more memory safety built in rather than Zig’s very manual cleanup, which is challenging in a project like Bun that is dealing with running another language.

The Bun team posted a small blog post about the migration with technical details about how they’re doing it, along with some thanks to the Zig team and positive notes about Zig. The Zig language creator posted a blog post where he ranted about the Bun creator writing “slop before LLMs” and being a “stinky manager” according to “juicy grapes” he heard through the grapevine and numerous other attacks. It was an emotionally charged response to one of the language’s flagship projects leaving for another language.

This split the community, or at least became divisive for a lot of people who have no interest in Bun but view the fight as a proxy for some other battle like hating LLMs or Rust.

It didn’t actually kill the project. The team was acquired by Anthropic and it (the Rust version) is being used in their products, so it’s actually running everywhere and doing more than ever. There was a poll on some subreddit that showed only 30% of people were going to keep using it after the rewrite and people keep holding this up as evidence that the project is dead.

The "Rewrite it in Rust!", all gas, no brakes zealotry predates LLM coding agents. When you dismiss the trade-offs with no consideration, and abide no questions about the possible cost of the "one true $X", you're practicing religion, not engineering. What has changed is the zealots no longer restricted to demanding that other people adapt their preferred language, but can now automate forking projects into their ideal language. I'm hoping the next shoe to drop is the realization that the language is a small part of a projects success, when it's time to maintain their forks.

> I could rewrite anything in unsafe Rust like right now, despite being a novice in the language.

I really doubt that. Unsafe Rust is actually significantly more difficult to get right than C or C++. See e.g. https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/ or https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/

It's not too big of a deal because in idiomatic Rust you pretty much never write unsafe code (except for FFI), but it would be nice if it was not quite so hard (or poorly defined).

throwing a token generator at an idea is not really fun. there’s a reason show hm rules say something about not posting quick one offs (pretty sure this was originally posted as a show hn?). the fun for someone like me is in the appreciation of the effort, not the result.

quirky idea? sure. but not fun

I expect Rust to eventually get used in the core kernel, or in drivers that everyone wants to use (e.g. some new bus or device on most new hardware), but I expect that by the time that happens the set of targets supported by the kernel and the set of targets supported by Rust (including through things like crustc and codegen_gcc) will have converged sufficiently.