Content Warning: anxiety, ableism
I wrote this a few days ago, barely before i had a panic attack due to a comment i got, and the wording here may be a little unkind sometimes. However, i have decided to keep it mostly as is, as modifying it extensively would feel like i am lying.
so, i have anxiety, generally about a lot of things, but one that is surprisingly hard to manage today is the one like “but what if the software i rely on is owned by fascists”. over the last few years though, it has generally morphed into a “but what if the software i rely on is one day owned by fascists and i don’t have an escape route”, which is, frankly, even worse. it isn’t rooted in anything rational anymore, but even though i know that, it still causes me to have an anxiety attack whenever something i rely on has a single point of failure anywhere. software, server, repositories, everything goes. i don’t think i need to explain how that makes life difficult in today’s software development world.
in fact, i mainly use c for exactly those reasons. it is one of the few language stacks that don’t cause me to have anxiety attacks. but there’s a very special group of people who take offense with that. a fair few rust devs view it as a moral good to write everything in rust, and using anything else is seen as either a sign of you being a fascist (you know ? the exact people i want to avoid.), or that you aren’t enlightened yet. i have tried it, and, surprise! it triggers every part of my anxiety. it would in fact make my software more secure, but i also wouldn’t be writing any software anymore. i know some would prefer that.
rust’s toolchain is extremely vulnerable to such takeovers (see the power dtolnay has over both the language and ecosystem), and it would be an extremely hard dependency. the language is near impossible to reimplement (mrustc does assumptions about the code’s correctness, and gccrs isn’t capable of compiling the rust standard library yet, let alone any program, though i hope this will change soon), and even if those were fixed, rust as a language is extremely reliant on a single package repository (crates.io), a single build system (cargo), and a single package manager (cargo), and going without those is completely unsupported. add to that that it almost seems as if the rust team is trying to make bootstrapping (in the sense of bootstrappable.org) impossible, which also worsens my anxiety.
it has gotten to a point where people have told me that i should either suck it up or should stop because “you are making the world worse by writing insecure code”. those aren’t very common, but they completely wreck me whenever i get them.
so, from now on, i am going to preemptively block anyone who tells me to use rust, in order to protect my mental health. i will also take no more of an interest at all anymore in a language whose community has hurt me so much. if you mention it ? i don’t care. use it ? don’t care. introduce it into software i use ? if i use it, it’s already either a gadget, or i can replace it, so i don’t care.
i find it quite ironic that a community that prides itself in acceptance of others will find itself easily disregarding someone’s mental disabilities whenever those work against them.
PS: the way i design things is i make them to be small and simple enough to be reimplemented shall anyone need to. be it for educational purposes, to fix a design decision in the way the implementation was done, to rewrite it in another language, or just for fun. the entire implementation is an implementation detail. by telling me it actually does matter, you either tell me that you think i did a bad job designing it, at which point, just point out why directly, or you’re saying you don’t know how to reimplement it and want me to rewrite it in your language for you.