• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s dumb culture war bullshit, but instead of revolving around black characters in media, it’s about a programming language. While there are legitimate critiques of both Rust and interoperating it with a legacy C codebase like Linux (and some people did in the mailings, even if a bit poorly communicated), It almost always boils down to how memory safety supposed to make development much easier, or the dreaded “Code of Conduct”.

    The biggest programming language culture warriors are often not even mainline C devs, but Javascript/Python devs that idolize the suffering of system devs. Others are just people who tell you to use Python if you want an “easy and productive” language instead of dealing with programming language jank that was needed in the 70’s when RAM was extremely limited.

    The anti-CoC crowd barely even codes. At least when Walter Bright and co. started to throw out chud adjacent people from D, it’s popularity decline reversed, although it also coincided with other changes in the language governance. It seems like the nazis didn’t even code, just were around to push D as a rival to Rust as a memory safe language, even if D’s memory safety features are more opt-in in nature (safe by default can be achieved by putting @safe: just after the module declaration).

    • RedSnt@feddit.dk
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      1 day ago

      Thanks, this seems like a very thorough description of the situation. My limited understanding of how coding works and has worked through history is like you say “filled with a lot of jank” regarding memory because it was limited but also because compilers weren’t as efficient as they are today. So it makes sense that there are purists that believes the only good code is the one where programmers are in total control of every bit of memory themselves instead of leaving anything to automation.