> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes.

This rings very true, and I've actually disadvantaged myself somewhat here. I was involved in projects that made very dubious decisions to rewrite large systems in Rust. This caused me to actively stay away from the language, and stick to C++, investing lots of time in overcoming its shortcomings.

Now years later, I started with Rust in a new project. And I must say, I like the language, I really like the tools, and I like the ecosystem. On some dimension I wish I would have done this sooner (but on the other hand, I think I have a better justification of "why Rust" now).

I'm contemplating diving into Rust for a smallish project, a daemon with super-basic UI intended for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Do you mind expanding on what disadvantages you encountered? Or use-cases that aren't appropriate for Rust?

It's all the stuff that people always mention; they are not wrong. You spend a decent amount of time... conversing with the compiler about lifetimes and, in my experience, even more so about the type system, which is _extremely_ complicated. But you also have to keep in mind that Rust got very popular, very fast, and the tail end of something like that is always a negative reaction. The language is the same, despite the hype roller coaster.

I find Rust's complexity freeing, in that there are often at least a few ways to express what I want, and I can choose the one I feel best fits the use-case and my desired ergonomics. (I also like that there are often ways to express exactly a very precise want, owing well to the Rust principle of "zero-cost abstractions.") However of course, that very same complexity can make it unclear which approach may best serve a given objective, and lead to false starts, wacky implementations, or even giving up entirely.

I'm not OP but here's my disadvantages. Rust is the way I earn my living, and also my open source tool of choice. And my background is 25 years of SWE career:

1. build / compile times can be atrocious

2. crates.io inherits the npm philosophy, which means fairly unmoderated space of third party deps and because the Rust stdlib doesn't have a lot in it, extensive third party crate (lib) usage is strong in Rust. As a result most Rust projects have rather sprawling dependency trees, often with duplicated functionality (multiple Base64, rand, sha256, etc crates). I personally have a problem with this (auditability, accountability, security, complexity etc). Others don't.

3. Despite being nominally runtime agnostic, Rust async basically is tokio and it's almost impossible to use another runtime once you factor in third party deps. In many ways Rust is the language that tokio ate. In fact even if you opt out of async entirely, you often end up with tokio as a dependency simply because the community just seems to expect it.

4. Despite advertising itself as a "systems" language, some basic systems programming facilities I expect from my C++ background are still fundamentally not there. In particular, per-container/struct pluggable allocators still isn't a thing and the feature to add it (allocator-api) has sat unmerged in nightly for almost ten years at this point and it doesn't look good for it landing any time soon.

5. If you're working in the embedded space, there's still plenty of devices that will not have a workable Rust toolchain option yet.

I still choose it for new projects instead of its competitors C++ or Zig. But I think it's important to recognize there are compromises like any other tool.

As much as people might insist otherwise, there will in fact come a day when there are "multiple Rusts" by which I mean multiple styles and ways of doing things -- just like C++. For myself, for example... if it were my repository and my team and my hiring, and I was starting from scratch... I'd be extremely careful about third party crate adoption and have an extremely minimalistic approach there. And I don't use tokio. Though my paying jobs do.

So many great and balanced comments in this thread.

Sure, and I'm available to provide balance commentary for hire, too ;-)

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like to work on what I'm working on right now though!

> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting.

And experience doesn't equal correct decision making. People just get traumatized in different ways.