@sugasheeze

1 month ago

you're 100% right that there's a huge dependency on other factors, but advertising something was written in rust didn't just come out of thin air. there have been so many quality tools written in rust in the last few years that it's built a bit of a reputation -- i use rust replacements for half of coreutils nowadays. rust just seems to attract a higher density of the type of engineer that build solid tools -- in addition to rust's higher performance potential than most langs. kinda makes sense when you think about, rust has a relatively high barrier to entry, low industry density (not a great lang to build a career on), but gives you the performance of c with the expressiveness of python -- it's the type of lang that draws in passionate engineers with an eye towards ergonomics.

so even though it's not a guarantee, if i'm trying to decide between a few reasonably comparable options i'll generally lean towards rust projects short other information. it's like german manufacturing, if you offered me a free suspension system i'd prolly pick the german one over a chinese one just because germans are well known for making fantastic springs and dampers. it's a heuristic that has historically worked out for me.

also, when people call something "rusty" or "oxidized," they don't usually just mean "written in rust." it typically also carries connotations of what's become an idiomatically "rusty" interface pattern (think about the way that ripgrep, sd, fd, zoxide, etc all have a familiar way of using them that differ from the tools they were designed to "replace").

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