Popularity and merit are not the same thing

Rust is very popular now. That doesn't mean it has a great design. One of the very first design decision/belief they made was "no code can perform with garbage collection". Well, garbage collection does cause quite a few performance problems, but that doesn't mean it can't work if you engineer it right.

Personally I think Go and Nim are better languages as a general statement, both for applications and systems programming.

I know I am going out on a limb making a negative statement like that, and previously Nim developers have tried to discourage me from saying negative things about Rust. Those guys are smart and have social skills and they realize they should be careful to be nice to Rust developers because sophisticated developers looking for things like performance, type safety, etc. with a C or C++ background are really going to benefit from Nim if they give it a chance and Rust developers are prime candidates for Nim conversion.

So let me just say clearly that I don't associate with the main Nim community, the core developers, or anyone really. Nothing I say here reflects on them I hope.

I literally have no friends in fact.

I don't understand people, or pay much attention to them, or interact with them very much. When I do interact I say what I really think, not what people want to hear.

What I DO understand is technology. From a very early age I have been programming in everything from different types of assembly language to C to C++ to Ruby, Javascript/CoffeeScript/ES7, different variants of SQL, Rust, Forth, OCaml, etc.

Mozilla is a leading technology organization with many contributors. Rust is a new technology with quite a few people innovating on it.

Unfortunately, Rust starts with a bad design decision and never really recovers from that design decision. The values and perspective are lacking a modern, contemporary perspective.

The Rust worldview is trapped in the C++ era.

I have been primarily a JavaScript developer both on the front and back end for many years now. Why? Because I like to make useful applications and I am sane and paying attention.

But in a world where people were better informed and had better judgement and the best things won out rather than the most popular, Rust would be an obscure language being toyed with by a few academics for (perhaps?) implementing certain parts of kernels, the new browser from Mozilla would be fully peer-to-peer capable (using IPFS/gittorrent/swarm/ndn etc), written in Nim of course, use JIT/VM/something Nim for scripting, and have thrown out JavaScript/ES6/ES7 AND CSS for good. Of course, in this ideal world there would be no google monopolizing all advertizing and capturing most good engineering talent, since semantic markup and p2p query would also be be built in to this browser, making google irrelevant. The default mode for the browser would be virtual reality, with the ability to render 2d operating systems or markdown/images on arbitrary 3d surfaces.

But instead we have the world we have. All advertising must follow the dictates of a giant all-powerful global corporation. Mozilla is trapped in a pseudo-C++ mindset and spending most of its efforts trying to reproduce the intractable mess of decades of CSS hacks, in the time the engineers have left after going through in excruciating detail all of the possible ways to 'borrow' memory. CSS, a brilliant system that is a pain the in the ass not only for programmers but also designers, so complex that only two computer programs in the world are known to do a reasonable job of rendering it accurately.

Its time to stop dragging the old tools, mindsets, and technical debt forward. Stop judging things on the basis of momentum or authority (Google/Mozilla/Microsoft) amd start using your brain to select things rationally.

Mozilla as an organization is not going to be capable of admitting they made a mistake with Servo/Rust and recoding it in Nim. Just like the world is not going to accept that we should throw out CSS and use any other simple system that can reproduce graphic designs. And we are not getting rid of JavaScript with its horrible threading model and garbage collection anytime. But we should. In a sane world we would learn from our mistakes and throw all of that out.

I was reading the Rust book and I came across this:

fn main() {
let p1 = Philosopher::new("Judith Butler");
let p2 = Philosopher::new("Gilles Deleuze");
let p3 = Philosopher::new("Karl Marx");
let p4 = Philosopher::new("Emma Goldman");
let p5 = Philosopher::new("Michel Foucault");
}

I know that the people who make the language are not necessarily the people who promote and document it, but Mozilla's pandering to left-wing extremists is getting on my nerves. Not to mention their "community governance policy" and their excessive usage of Javascript and Google applications. The API docs on their website don't even work without Javascript. A community and a language are not necessarily the same thing, but they do affect one another. Does it make sense to trust such people with the language? And let's not forget this little gem: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193575.html. I know this guy stepped down, but it shows the attitude that some of those people have. Like Tinyboard, this is one of those cases where I think twice about who's software I'm using and consider alternatives.

And I don't personally care about people's political philosophies. I begin to care when they start pushing it on others. I've used software made by some nasty people that I would never like to spend time with, but I didn't care because they never forced their political beliefs on me.