Rust's Downfall: From Rising Star to Rejected by Major Projects (2025)

> While Rust is undeniably powerful and stands out for its emphasis on safety, it comes with a relatively steep learning curve.

I've got... 60,172 total lines of Rust code across all my repositories.

I didn't write a single line of it. Claude writes Rust very well because of the Compile-Error-Edit loop.

That's what's going to define the winners in the future.

If you're going to post a click and rage bait article, at least mention when it was published. We're close to the article's first anniversary. A lot has changed in between and the premise of this story isn't even valid or relevant anymore for it to be on HN again. And that's a charitable interpretation, given that the 3 cases that the article presents to argue that Rust was 'rejected by major projects' need special scrutiny.

But first, let's look at where Rust stands now. The Fish shell has been ported to Rust entirely. Git is experimenting with Rust integration. Linux has declared the Rust4Linux project out of experimental stage - which means that Rust code will more or less be a permanent part of Linux from now on. FreeBSD is experimenting with Rust in their kernel. Microsoft has declared their intention to replace all critical code with Rust in the future. A lot of JavaScript development tools are now in Rust. There's just too many other cases for me to continue like this. The 'downfall' part is a bit out of touch with reality here.

Now let's look at the 3 cases that the author uses to dismiss Rust as a failure:

1. Daniel Stenberg's attempt to integrate the Rust Hyper backend into curl. He abandoned it because he found it too hard to integrate it into C. So the case chosen here is a small team attempting to combine code in two programming languages. Such attempts are always challenging, experimental and never guaranteed to succeed. Choosing such an uncertain task to evaluate Rust's capabilities is not a fair deal at all. Yet, they did manage to integrate two other Rust backends - rustls (for TLS) and uiche (for QUIC and HTTP/3). So perhaps they didn't fail at all? And Linux succeeded in the same task at a much bigger scale.

2. Prisma migrating its core logic from Rust to TypeScript. How is this an apples to apples comparison? The article itself says that it was because of the preference of a primarily typescript crowd. They wanted access to the core, but their lack of Rust knowledge made it difficult for them. So Rust was out of place there to begin with. Another inappropriate case for evaluating Rust.

3. Author Austin Stark's experience with Rust for his trading platform. This is probably the most egregious example. Austin wrote the article complaining about Rust in June 2024 - 7 months before this article. But he reversed his stance and praised Rust in December 2024 - a month before this article. The author just ignored the latter completely. I can't take this seriously.

I'm an enthusiastic Rust programmer. But I really don't mind articles that are critical of Rust, as long as they shed some valuable insight on Rust or systems programming in general. But this one reads either like a lazy attempt at a hit on Rust or as a rage bait for clicks. I always avoid touching the personal side of such submissions, but I can't help notice this about @RustSupremacist who submitted this one. You've submitted 8 stories so far, including 5 dissing on Rust (including 3 that got flagged) and one dissing on Zig. Why not write an article on your beef with Rust and post it here, instead of reposting misleading baits?