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Rust: The New Golden Cage of Programming
A Cynical Critique by a Linux Old-Timer
#Linux #Rust #OpenSource #TechCritique #CyberSecurity #Programming #HackerCulture #Kernel #SoftwareDevelopment #UnixPhilosophy #FOSS #Code
Rust: the language that promises safety, concurrency, and memory efficiency while shipping with a built-in dependency hell called Cargo. It's the new darling of corporate bureaucrats, a fashionable replacement for C, and a utopian vision of software development where everything is "safe"—except, of course, your freedom.
1. The "Safety First" Cult
Rust's entire branding hinges on "safety"—as if C programmers are reckless madmen wielding segfaults like machetes. Sure, Rust prevents buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs, but at what cost? You trade raw control for an elaborate ownership system that treats you like a kindergartener who can't be trusted with a pointer. Meanwhile, the same Rust evangelists pushing memory safety are perfectly fine shipping WASM blobs, bloated Electron apps, and endless dependencies that triple the attack surface.
2. Cargo Cultism: Dependency Hell 2.0
Remember when people mocked Node.js for node_modules? Rust does the same thing, but calls it "Cargo." Instead of small, self-contained binaries, you now need an entire build ecosystem just to compile "hello world." Dependencies pile up, each project dragging in its own version of every crate, and suddenly your supposedly "efficient" Rust binary needs half of crates.io just to function.
3. The False Promise of Performance
Rust is fast, they say. Just like Go, just like Java, just like every new language that claims to dethrone C. Except in reality, Rust trades real-world performance for theoretical safety. The borrow checker slows down development, the compiler takes an eternity to produce a binary, and at the end of the day, it’s only “fast” in benchmarks carefully designed to prove it’s fast. Meanwhile, well-written C still runs the world’s most performance-critical software, and it does so without forcing programmers to bend over backwards for an arbitrary ownership model.
4. The Corporate Takeover of Open Source
Linux was built by hackers who value efficiency and control. Rust? Rust is being pushed by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—the same companies that brought you Android’s endless bloat, AWS’s vendor lock-in, and Windows 11’s TPM spyware. Rust is the programming language equivalent of a gated community: lots of fancy features, but you need permission to do anything truly low-level. It's no coincidence that Rust is being integrated into Linux kernel development just as corporate interests start infiltrating open-source governance.
5. The Language That Loves to Hate Itself
Rust developers are constantly rewriting everything. Rust 2015, Rust 2018, Rust 2021, Rust 2024… Each new edition comes with subtle breaking changes, deprecations, and "improvements" that require yet another round of refactoring. Contrast this with C, where code from the 1970s still compiles today. Rust programmers love talking about stability, but in practice, it's a never-ending treadmill of "this function is now unsafe" and "that syntax is deprecated."
6. The Future: A World Where You Don’t Own Your Software
Rust is perfect if your dream is to live in a world where every application is a SaaS subscription, every compiler update breaks something, and every binary is an opaque blob packed with dependencies. The free software movement fought for user control, but Rust leads us toward a future where corporate-approved "safe" programming replaces personal responsibility. It’s not about empowering programmers—it’s about controlling them.
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How to Stay Rust-Free and Drop the Cargo While Staying True to Linux
Use C when you need control. It's still the foundation of Linux, and nothing beats the simplicity of gcc -o myprogram myprogram.c.
Use Zig for modern alternatives. It gives you the safety of Rust without the bureaucratic ownership model and dependency bloat.
Write simple, portable code. The Unix philosophy is about minimalism and efficiency, not forcing developers to learn a PhD-level borrow checker to print a string.
Reject corporate-led trends. If Big Tech is pushing it, ask yourself: who benefits?
Stick to real hacker tools. If your compiler needs an entire package manager to function, it's not minimalist, it's not UNIX, and it's certainly not in the spirit of Linux.
Rust is not the future. Rust is a well-designed cage, wrapped in corporate-friendly marketing, sold as "progress" while slowly eroding the hacker ethos that built the digital world we live in today.
Don’t fall for it.