This is the exact reason I won’t learn Rust past looking quickly the doc: the promotion made by some very vocal people is a huge turn off. Notably by saying that everything must be rewritten in Rust, it implies that every other language is sh*t and people using them are dumb. Of course I don’t like that view for my work nor I won’t to be associated with this kind of people. This is a bit sad because the language probably have some interesting points, but the social aspect of it just don’t fit the bill.
Looking at how many CVEs are caused by undefined behavior and insecure properties of C, there is merit to the claim that Rust is objectively better than C in the strictness department and if safety/security is a major concern to you, you should absolutely choose Rust over C in new projects.
As for rewriting existing C software in Rust, the usual caveats for rewrites apply. Decades-old software like coreutils has had many eyes on the code, so the chance of catastrophic bugs decreases over time (but never to zero).
Just for the record, the annoying vocal promotion is not coming from the Rust team. The people who actually know the language know its limitations, and discourage overhyping it. Language flamewars are banned on all forums moderated by the core Rust community.
It's calmed down the past year or so but before that it was so insane (especially here on HN) that the impression will be hard to erase for those who were around to see it.
I was around, but still didn't actually see it. I see people complaining about it more than I actually see the comments themselves. That's why I always ask for concrete examples, and people never actually show them to me.
