Why is Rust difficult?
Is there a way to avoid the true-believer syndrome for Rust?<p>I want to embrace Rust, but everyone ~100% of the time comes away chanting about how awesome Rust is. So much so that it's a bit unsettling. Zealotry in general is bad, but especially in programming: once you identify as an X programmer, you lose out on ideas from Y and Z.<p>Every tool has its flaws, but for whatever reason it seems extremely rare to discuss Rust's. When you try, it's like you're the Pied Piper: your song brings seemingly the entire community scurrying towards you, ready to force-push you why you're wrong and why Rust is awesome.<p>How about no REPL? We Go now. Slow compiler? Check. Performance is nice, and so is parallelism, but it costs static typing. It's a nice tool to have in your pocket as a fallback, but where's the niche? The ecosystem is huge, too: run `du -hs ~/.cargo/` and see how many GBs you're losing. This is a really tough sell on a 256GB SSD.<p>"So get a bigger SSD!" "Yeah but the compiler is always improving" "Yes but real programmers don't really need a REPL" "Yeah but static typing is worth the tradeoffs"<p>These refrains have been identical for nearly a year. Is there anything new to say, or is it time to agree to disagree?