
A new look for rust-lang.org - steveklabnik
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/11/29/a-new-look-for-rust-lang-org.html
======
mjw1007
A personal opinion:

The old site said to me "Here's a programming language made by programmers for
programmers.".

The new site says to me "Here's a programming language which has a marketing
team.".

The "Featuring" bullet list was an excellent way of calling out what makes
Rust distinctive, and I felt I could trust what it said to be basically true.

But claims like "empowers everyone to become a systems programmer" or "Rust
has great documentation", coming from the language's own designers, convey
little information: they might be an over-optimistic view.

(Or, in the language of the blog post: I trust them to tell me what a
fireflower is. I'd rather judge for myself whether I believe that it will turn
me into Fire Mario.)

~~~
ajkjk
I strongly agree. The list of features on the old list is very meaningful to a
C programmer who will recognize all of those things as things would love to
use every day. Its underlying message is "we're technical nerds and we made a
thing that you'll like".

The new version is corporate-speak that won't appeal to.. anyone? Its
underlying message is "we're trying to get you to like us and we studied how
to do this".

But, like, what's the point of a programming language's website anyway? Most
people who visit the site will probably be at least vaguely aware of it. You
use it if recommendations online, code samples, etc are compelling, and if the
early adoption story (examples and motivations) are compelling. All I ever
want is a list of examples up front and center. The more words I have to get
through that aren't literal actual examples that show both what the language
looks like and what differentiates it... the more exhausting the whole
experience.

~~~
rhn_mk1
I totally agree. As a coder, whenever I visit a website of a project I'm
interested in, I'm looking for key technical features to convince me it's the
right tool for the job, or that it offers an unique property tht I never even
thought about. That's usually conveyed in a list of bullet points, and a
couple of examples.

I can rarely find it though. I wasn't quite able to grasp why, and I kind of
accepted this as how it is. But after seeing the two revisions side by side, I
finally get it! The important, unique information found in the old version.
The majority of project web sites are closer to the new version, which hides
the complexity behind colorful "screens" and headlines which are short,
friendly, distracting, and very, very bland, delivering the same "simplicity,
performance, productivity" message regardless of the project. Can you guess
what Docker does (or does especially well) just based on the website? [0]

I've learned to cut the crap and go straight to the "about" page to understand
the distinct advantages in a more condensed form, but that seems to be missing
from the redesign.

[0] [https://www.docker.com/](https://www.docker.com/)

~~~
throwawaylolx
>As a coder

Obviously the website is no longer targeted at coders: the Rust Team seems to
target managers to push adoption. To me, it looks like a corporation that has
to report user growth every quarter, so they start employing harmful UX to
desperately try to push the numbers up.

------
ipsum2
In my (useless) opinion, the old website looks more modern and approachable. I
can see immediately what are the benefits of Rust, as well as a code sample.
The new site only offers a vague tagline ("The programming language that
empowers everyone to become a systems programmer."), which doesn't explain
much.

~~~
jamescostian
In my (useful(?)) opinion, the code sample didn't really illustrate the nice
things about rust. I do like the bulleted list from the old website, but I
find the new website more modern and approachable (especially with all the big
headings and smaller text that drills down into the details). Maybe they
wanted to give users a more focused view on the biggest selling points, rather
than show some generic-looking code and several bullet points that noobs might
not understand?

But, in my (useless) opinion, the green is... "bold", and that part isn't very
modern or approachable

------
andrepd
They have a clean, effective website. It has a pleasing look, and mostly it's
just what a webpage should be, after all: a document. Text, images, an
interactive code editor. Some CSS to make it look pleasing and readable. A
navbar at the top. It works, it is pleasing to the eye, it communicates what
it what it is meant to communicate and links to 4 important sections of the
website.

Wait, let's throw all that away and develop a vomit-inducing monstrosity,
complete with: in-your-face extra-bold title headers, jarring colours and
colour changes, overall very large design suitable for tablets and not
desktops (which is after all where most of your target audience should be
accessing from)... What a complete cock-up. The web design equivalent of
painting flames on your car: an immature attempt to look "cool" that turns the
thing into an horrendous mess.

I can only sincerely ask why why why.

~~~
bsder
> What a complete cock-up.

Ferociously bad doesn't even begin to cover it.

This is a result of Rust attempting to be "social ecosystem" instead of a
"useful programming language". Sigh.

If you really wanted to improve the current website, make the "Featuring"
bullets actually change the code in the runbox. Now _THAT_ would be impressive
so that people can actually see what all the fuss actually looks like.

As for the new site, I'll leave the cosmetics to people far more qualified to
judge.

However, as someone who works in embedded and has been tracking Rust, the
_idea_ of putting "Embedded" on the front page and trying to advertise Rust as
a useful embedded language isn't just laughable--it's dangerous. Rust is so
far from useful in embedded that people who try to use it will _NEVER_ come
back and they will report to their managers that it shouldn't even be looked
at for another 5-10 years.

Until I can sit down with a sparkly new Windows 10 VM, plug my board in via
USB, fire of a Windows installer, double-click on a selection dialog for my
current evaluation board, watch it crunch and then pop up a Debug windows with
an LED blinking, we're not even at the starting line. (Most environments for
embedded now are pretty good about this--getting your blinking LED really is
the "Hello, World!" equivalent).

~~~
vtesucks
I don't mind who downboted this but it would help me to learn why?

It seems to me that this comment is making a valid point, if only in a strong
tone.

~~~
dbrgn
Probably because of snippets like this one:

"the idea of putting "Embedded" on the front page and trying to advertise Rust
as a useful embedded language isn't just laughable--it's dangerous. Rust is so
far from useful in embedded that people who try to use it will NEVER come
back"

Embedded is still at its early development stages, just like WASM and just
like asynchronous network programming. Still, all those are on the front page.

WASM a year ago and wasm todays is a tremendous difference. A year ago, in my
opinion, WASM was something for experimentation. Now, a lot of the ecosystem
"just works" and is developing really quickly. You can write a working JS
library and upload it to NPM without even touching a line of JavaScript code.

Async (network) programming in Rust with async/await is promising but still in
flux, so the ecosystem hasn't settled yet. Still, a lot of systems already use
it in production.

Embedded in Rust a year ago was mostly a list of blogposts, an early draft of
HAL traits and some random register binding crates. You had to use nightly,
and your code would frequently break. But in just a few weeks, you'll be able
to use Embedded on stable, there is an active ecosystem developing around
svd2rust, groups like stm-rs and lpc-rs are forming and a lot of device
agnostic drivers have already been written. Combine that with a _very_
promising preview of a new version of the RTFM framework. It's not production
ready yet, but I'd estimate it will be within 2 years. See
[https://github.com/rust-embedded/awesome-embedded-
rust](https://github.com/rust-embedded/awesome-embedded-rust) for a summary of
the ecosystem.

The problem with the post above is not that it's written in a strong tone.
It's that it's uninformed, generalizing and unfair.

~~~
bsder
> Embedded is still at its early development stages, just like WASM and just
> like asynchronous network programming. Still, all those are on the front
> page.

That is more an indictment of WASM and asynchronous network programming than a
vote of confidence for embedded...

And I avoided commenting about things other than embedded explicitly because I
don't have any background to judge those.

> It's that it's uninformed, generalizing and unfair.

You claim this statement is the problem:

"the idea of putting "Embedded" on the front page and trying to advertise Rust
as a useful embedded language isn't just laughable--it's dangerous. Rust is so
far from useful in embedded that people who try to use it will NEVER come
back"

and then follow it with: "But in just a few weeks, you'll be able to use
Embedded on stable" "It's not production ready yet, but I'd estimate it will
be within 2 years."

Ummmmmm ... I think you just made my case for me.

I pull a bunch of the embedded Rust stuff about every 4-6 months and build a
"blinky". I have an intern try this about every 9 months--I have yet to have
an intern make _any_ meaningful progress without me holding their hand every
step of the way. Those same interns pull down Keil and fire off a blinky in
about 4-6 hours without my help. Boards with their own environments like
Silicon Labs or NXP are generally faster--about 2-3 hours to blinky--but are
more annoying when you have to do something outside the "flow".

I'd argue that experience makes me quite specific and informed and my comments
quite fair. Thanks.

If you point an embedded engineer at the Rust embedded ecosystem to evaluate,
he will hand you your head on a platter. Embedded is _NOT_ ready and putting
it on the front page is going to get you a reputation for half-assed-ness.

The problem is that Rust is moving "slow and steady" in an era where everyone
wants "growth hacking". Or, if I'm feeling particularly nasty and snarky, Rust
"thought leaders" outside Mozilla are annoyed that Rust isn't providing the
revenue opportunities for speaking and consulting that languages like Go and
Swift do (like Rails used to).

Rust honestly doesn't have a marketing problem. Most of the people I know who
might benefit from Rust are tracking it--even up to VP of Engineering levels
(oddly, Rust appears to be better regarded than you would expect)--however
these people are doing hard-headed cost analyses and don't find Rust to be
coming out on the winning side most of the time. The issue is simply that most
of the current languages are entrenched for various reasons and moving them
aside requires that you be _demonstrably_ better--and that implies i's dotted
and t's crossed.

See Theo de Raadt about Rust in OpenBSD: [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=151233345723889&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=151233345723889&w=2)

What Rust _really_ has is a completeness problem. The lack of completeness in
Rust reminds me of Lisp quite a lot--lots of libraries at 70%, very little at
99%+. Every time I try to use Rust for a project, _some_ library isn't up to
scratch or requires some odd combination that demands nightly, has some weird
showstopper bug that will be fixed "Real Soon Now(tm)" that has been extant
for 24 months, etc. Fortunately, Mozilla needs Rust to be up to scratch for
Firefox, so at least certain core things get driven to completeness.

I can contrast Rust at 8 years old (and I'm being generous) to Python at 8
years old (sigh, I'm now a greybeard ... "Back in my day, sonny..." <shakes
cane>) Rust isn't convincing me to throw any of my languages away in spite of
the fact that I really hate C. Python at 8 years old was good enough for me to
throw Perl 5 away at roughly the zenith of Perl 5's popularity--now _that 's_
completeness.

I like Rust, but people need to get comfortable with the fact that Rust has a
long, slow, unsexy road ahead of it.

~~~
vtesucks
I have to agree with you. While rust definitely is making progress, wasting
peoples time by telling them things are ready is not done.

------
shafte
I actually like the new website. I think the primary barrier to Rust adoption
now is something along the lines of "my organization doesn't use it"—this
website is clearly geared toward persuading CTOs or administrators.

It's a sign of the strength of the Rust community that they feel they no
longer need to persuade developers. It implies that many developers have
already heard about and are interested in Rust, but need higher-ups to approve
using it.

~~~
asauce
Well said. As a programmer I prefer the old site, however you bring up a good
point. The new site is a lot better for people in management to see that Rust
is used by other large companies and to not immediately discredit it.

~~~
spacesuitman2
Then why not make two sites?

management.rust-lang.org and rust-lang.org

------
TylerJewell
I'm CEO of WSO2 and we are working on a programming language for writing
microservices called 'Ballerina', and we host it's community at
[http://ballerina.io](http://ballerina.io). Prior to the first public launch,
I pulled 9 of our core community members into an offsite where we developed
and implemented the web site.

It was a challenging exercise and so can relate to Rust's community efforts to
the redesign. I wanted to offer some perspectives of what Rust's challenges
must be.

1\. It is really hard to capture the value proposition for a programming
language. While working through Ballerina, there is a hard balance between a)
describing the language design, b) explaining why language elements are
valuable, c) describe the key types of programming workloads that most benefit
from your language philosophy, d) direct those interested to learn more to the
right information, efficiently.

2\. As such, whomever is leading the Rust site evolution over the years shows
a real touch and depth for messaging. It takes a lot of insight and careful
observation to your community over an extended period of time to tease out
which elements are fundamentally what is driving your audience. Having said
this, I have a tendency to feel that the messaging in the latest version might
be creating a messaging abstraction trying to appeal to a wider developer base
vs. the messaging in the current site which is more strongly appealing to
existing system developers. Is this a conscious choice of the Rust team?

3\. The rust team has figured out, through years of promotion, that the first
(and last) question language teams get is always about "who's using the
language? how big is the community?". The hardest part about birthing a
language is the chicken and egg problem - someone needs to be the first big
production app. Dogfooding is really the only way. Rust takes this head on.

I am not a big design person, so don't have an opinion about whether the
minimalistic design is better than the new flowing design. A lot of the design
influences for ballerina.io came from Go and Rust lang's web site - we are
fans! So, I guess you could say that we prefer the minimalism concept.

~~~
steveklabnik
Just... thank you. Truly.

~~~
kjeetgill
Hey Steve,

I wanted to chime in and say I'm sorry so much of the crticism on HN failed to
stay on the right side of constructive. You and your team deserve more respect
than that.

What's triggering people, likey fans rust fans sadly enough, is seeing their
identity and fandom slipping away from focus. If this page had been presented
as a why-rust.org splash page instead of a replacement for a treasured
resource I'm sure those same vitrolic people would have been ambivalent at
worst.

I like the new page. I'd hate to lose the old one, even if it moves to a rust-
doc.org domain or something. And maybe a link to it from the splash page!

That's for all your hard work.

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks.

There's no way we can keep up the maintenance of two entire copies of the
site; we can barely do the work for one.

------
laszlokorte
The colors, the fonts and the thick bars behind the headlines are really
distracting and most important: example code on the front is missing as well
as the clearly stated list of features ("zero-cost abstractions, move
semantics, guaranteed memory safety [...]").

The buttons in the "get involved" section should better be labeled "read the
book", "watch videos" and "read contribution guide".

The z-index of the "Click here to try out the new beta site!" banner on rust-
lang.org is wrong when scrolling down.

~~~
laszlokorte
And in my opinion the old white/blue/black color scheme provided a very
familiar and simple corporate identity throughout the ecosystem.

I don't think those new playful colors will fit the whole ecosystem.

------
deogeo
The old site was pleasantly minimal, easy to find the important things at a
glance, and fit everything into a single screen.

The new one overloads you with bright, ever changing colors and useless
marketing, while hiding important stuff like language documentation into a
tiny link at the very bottom, next to the site terms and conditions.

It is dazzle camouflage [0] for information.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage)

------
piinbinary
Feature request: A documentation search bar right at the top on the homepage.
As an existing user, that's usually the first thing I want to see. After that,
a link to browse the documentation. Then a link to install it.

When looking at the home page, I don't know what "Get started" is going to
take me to, but experience with other sites has given me a bad taste with "Get
started" buttons. (The content it leads to here is good, though much of it
would have been better put on the front page.)

Personally, I think trying to sell the language on the homepage is the wrong
goal. I like language examples on the homepage to make a snap judgement about
a language. If I can't see an example, I'm going to assume that there is a
reason you don't want me to see it.

If I'm unfamiliar with the language, the things I want are:

* A code example

* A listing of properties of the language (e.g. statically typed, compiled, no gc, memory managed at compile time, etc)

* A command to install it

* A link to a tutorial where I can quickly try out the basics

* A link to the documentation so I can get a sense of its quality

* A link to the github page

~~~
steveklabnik
Part of the issue with that is that our documentation search isn’t unified.
It’s gonna take a lot of work for that to happen.

------
LandR
I liked the old site better. It looked like a site about Rust programming
language. It had the benefits of the language on it, this new site doesn't
look like a site for programmers at all.

It now just looks like every other generic looking product page out there.

I think if I had come to this new site, and not the old site, I might not have
bothered to even try Rust out. The new look is just so 'meh'.

~~~
nathanaldensr
Form (brand) over function, I guess?

------
mwcampbell
I'm disappointed that the Rust community is moving from open IRC to
proprietary Discord. Sure, people think IRC is archaic, but for them, the
Discourse-based forum is plenty modern, isn't it? The fact that Discord is
proprietary means that people aren't free to use any alternative client they
want. This is especially problematic for people who aren't well served by the
official client, e.g. blind people.

~~~
steveklabnik
Discourse is for async communication, you need both.

We love open source, but it’s one of many options to weigh. They’re also a
production user of Rust, which is a pro. It’s not that there are no cons, of
course... there’s just really no perfect option in this space.

~~~
vtesucks
I just want to say that if and if not you're the PR guy for rust, you're doing
a great job.

Rust is a well thought language and while I don't agree with the redesign, I
like that you bring the thoughtfulness to the non-language component as well.

I enjoy your blog posts.

Ps: Your parent comment was opposed to discord not discourse.

~~~
mwcampbell
I don't think Steve got Discord and Discourse mixed up. I did suggest that
people who won't get on IRC could use Discourse instead, but Steve rightly
pointed out that they're different.

Maybe Gitter instead of Discord? After GitLab acquired Gitter, they open-
sourced it.

~~~
steveklabnik
We had a bad experience with Gitter, and so decided against it.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
This website seems like they are targeting CEO and CTO's. The website looks
very much like a business website trying to get corporations to sign up. The
old website felt it was targeting programmers with it's code sample that you
could modify and run directly on the web page.

~~~
Siilwyn
Yes exactly! The content targetting "system programmers" is odd as Rust is
great for so much more like the examples towards the bottom about webassembly
and such.

Additionally the website seems to take longer to load.

------
andrewflnr
Rule #1 of useful programming language websites is to have some sample code
above the fold. With this design, I'm not sure where I'm even supposed to go
to find some. I'm surprised at how decent it looks visually on my phone,
despite my disliking the color scheme. But please, you're not selling some
amorphous, all-singing, all-dancing enterprise product, you're trying to tell
us about a programming language. So tell us about the language.

------
majewsky
The one thing that I noticed immediately is that it sends all visitors' data
to Google by means of embedding a Google Calendar. I'd like it more if the
"Upcoming Events" panel listed the N upcoming events with a link to the Google
Calendar, so that users can decide whether to send data to Google servers.

------
geodel
Old website looked like made by well meaning technical people who do not have
all the time in world to make website with all the latest fads in web design.

New one looks like some shady marketing crap put together with off-the-shelf
components like bootstrap libs. But it does 'empowers everyone'. May be they
can add 'No programer left behind' and we all be happy.

------
xedrac
I honestly can't look at the page for more than a few seconds without feeling
very nauseous. The stark color changes everywhere make it hard to scan the
page for relevant information. It feels way too distracting. I really like
Guile's front page. It's very easy on the eyes and yet provides a lot of
useful information:
[https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/)

------
kiliancs
In general I like the approach of the beta website, though I prefer the very
simple visual style of the current one.

The one main objection is the new slogan.

> Rust: The programming language that empowers everyone to become a systems
> programmer.

They claim it better conveys "what you can do with Rust", but in my opinion
being a systems programmer is not more descriptive than the previous statement
and it can be read as Rust not being a good choice for anything else than
traditional systems programming, which is obviously not true.

Additionally, and this is subjective, I perceive an elitist tone, as in
somehow all other programmers should aim to become system programmers, a more
elevated type of programmer. I get this is not the intention and I repeat it's
subjective, but still.

~~~
Skunkleton
Also, systems programming is about so much more than being good a programming
in a particular language. Programming in rust doesn't make you understand
memory barriers.

~~~
saagarjha
> Programming in rust doesn't make you understand memory barriers.

I'm not a fan of the new website, but it's possible that the intent was to be
"with Rust, you don't have to".

~~~
Skunkleton
I guess it depends on what you mean by systems programming. You absolutely
need to understand memory barriers if you are doing operating systems work; no
language can spare you from that.

------
IshKebab
I mean, it's ok. But language sites should have examples of the language on
their home page and this _removes_ that in favour of a load of marketing
fluff. That is just wrong.

I get that you want to say what works well with Rust, but frankly few of these
things are unique to Rust. With minimal changes I could turn this page into
one advertising C++ or D.

It's ok to add the new content but the code example and list of unique
features shouldn't have been removed.

------
Insanity
I prefered the old slogan. It actually told me a bit about the language and
made me curious to pick it up.

The new slogan does not do that for me. But I might not be their main target -
I like programming languages for the code itself and not the
applications/domains where I can use it.

The website didn't need a redesign either imo, but it is better than the
changed slogan.

------
unethical_ban
I'm not a huge fan, but it's not bad. Some Rust sponsors have their big logos
on there, and the Rust Book (the real documentation) is at the very bottom of
the page.

------
tphan
Tabbing through the page is kinda annoying because they've set outline: 0 on
all the buttons.

~~~
knrz
Genuinely curious about any opinions on how to handle this. I've personally
set outline: 0 because I can't stand the blue glow that Chrome puts on.

Is there a way to have good keyboard support & have it look good?

------
zzzcpan
Fear of empty space is showing a lot on new website. Also poor contrast, poor
font size, poor vertical spacing, buttons as links - all make things very
difficult to even just read. Meanings of links and labels are confusing too.

Don't make it so hard for people to find the compiler and documentation. You
are not going to attract users this way.

------
HereBeBeasties
The existing site's "rust by example" is extremely valuable. It's up front and
centre. In the new site it's very buried, which is a shame. Much easier to get
started, perhaps, but much less easy to see whether I'd want to in the first
place.

The getting started stuff is good, though.

------
hardwaresofton
> Please file an issue with any feedback you have! We’re also looking for
> people with abilities of all kinds to help maintain the site, and especially
> people with design, CSS, and marketing skills. If you’d like to get
> involved, please email us!

Just a reminder that if you've got some time to type out a comment in this
thread voicing your dissatisfaction you could type that comment out into a
Github issue[0] and become a certified open source contributor(tm)!

One of the best things about rust is it's community and it's willingness to
change and find better ways to do things.

[0]: [https://github.com/rust-lang/beta.rust-
lang.org/issues/new/c...](https://github.com/rust-lang/beta.rust-
lang.org/issues/new/choose)

------
shmerl
I like the design of Haxe front page: [https://haxe.org](https://haxe.org)

It explains both what it is and how it can be used, with a simple (but not
oversimplified) presentation. It has a code sample too.

It's better to keep the the code sample on the Rust site as well.

------
gpm
Generally LGTM.

I loved the playground editor embedded in the old front page. Any chance it
can be added to this one as well?

~~~
steveklabnik
We loved the code snippets in the abstract, but nobody could come up with
good, succinct, representative ones.

------
csomar
I don't like the new beta website. It doesn't feel rusty. It would have been
better if they just kept slowly improving the old website.

------
detaro
The content changes make a lot of sense (even though I'm not a fan of a
screenful of "testimonials"), but the design feels dated, and not in the good
way, like a bad kind of pseudo-retro :/

------
disillusion
Warning; I'm going to have a brutally honest opinion here.

It's better to start over. With a proper UX design, a proper visual design and
a good quality frontend developer. Or at least, as close as you can get.

My first few thoughts on the design:

The design language doesn't seem to convey anything. Whoever chose that color
palette? What are the core principles it's supposed to show you?

Elements are severely misaligned all over the place. There is no coherency,
composition or vertical rhythm to be found. It has a hodgepodge of font sizes
and weights without clear typographic hierarchy.

Links are actually missing a hover state. Buttons have a hover state, just
don't expect it to be noticeable. Just like the font size on the buttons -
those are 12px. We don't have 1280x1024 screens, unless I've somehow traveled
back in time to 1999. 16px minimum, please.

There is too little breathing room on mobile. It's not actually responsive, it
just collapses on a single breakpoint. That breakpoint is also in the wrong
place (960px), making it too big on tablet portrait (750px buttons, really?)
and too small on desktop (960px max on HD+ screens, even 2.5K screens -
really?).

It looks like it's made with an off the shelf layout framework without any
sort of customization. There's a horrible google calendar embed - why not a
simple, integrated solution? There are upscaled(!) PNG logos on there
(Chucklefish, Yelp) - why not use a vector file, like decent folk?

Those design patterns are barebones, but work reasonable well on the homepage.
However, the moment you click through they seem to be (ab)used for anything
and everything. Where are the other, less generalized patterns? And why are
the patterns not actually designed for mobile as well? Just dumping all the
buttons below each other and making them 100% wide does not make for a good
user experience. For that matter, why are there not more effective patterns
used? Code example could really use an, oh I don't know, inline code example
perhaps? Fortunately, almost all links go to external (sub)sites -without
warning- so you won't have to look at this for too long. Just a shame
everything looks different from each other, even subsites.

Where are the loving touches? It doesn't have to be a christmas tree, but a
little transitions and effects go a long way.

As for the code:

A display font is fine, but preloading six (6!) font weights of the body font,
just on the homepage? And not even .woff2 or .woff, but huge .ttf files at
that! That's about 3MB of fonts. Nice when you're on 3G; you can see the
webpage building up.

It seems to use utility classes. The responsibility for style composition
should be in your stylesheets, never in the HTML. The classes look like some
clever backend developer cooked them up: "v-top pl4 pl0-l pt0 pt3-l measure-
wide-l mw4 mw5-ns w-100 mw-none ph3 mw8-m mw9-l center f3". There, everybody
intelligent will immediately know what it does! If you rely on good will for
maintenance, this will limit the amount of developers willing to dig in.

Also, there are 4 different CSS files, separated for no apparent reason. Three
of which aren't even minified.

SVG illustrations should be placed inline.

As someone with an enmity for big javascript libraries used in the wrong
places, the fact that there's no JS should be wonderful. Except that I'm
guessing that's part of the reason those design patterns are so barebones.

There's lots more, but let's pick the low hanging fruits first.

PS: I prefer this version: [https://www.rust-lang.org/en-
US/](https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/) ;-) It might be stamp-sized visually,
but it does some things much better.

~~~
steveklabnik
We hired a designer. We're not frontend devs, but do have people who have some
experience with this.

Please file bugs! [https://github.com/rust-lang/beta.rust-
lang.org/issues/new/c...](https://github.com/rust-lang/beta.rust-
lang.org/issues/new/choose)

Some of this is stuff we know, and are tweaking. As the blog post about this
says, this is a beta, and we have a lot more work to do. For example, the
calendar thing: it's temporary. It's not trivial to style. There's been zero
optimization work, which is a lot of what your comment is about. We didn't
want to invest in that until we got the big picture stuff down.

------
sciurus
The beta site is several times slower to load than the old site.

[https://www.webpagetest.org/result/181130_4K_96804be61480d15...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/181130_4K_96804be61480d159a727823bbf4d1aff/)

[https://www.webpagetest.org/result/181130_FK_8e4d67b49b8d2ea...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/181130_FK_8e4d67b49b8d2ea9772797f0da039081/)

~~~
steveklabnik
Yes, we’ve done zero performance work yet. That comes next. There’s no reason
this site can’t be super fast.

------
rayascott
I like it, but I would ditch the super heavy fonts. They are needlessly
difficult to read. You only have to look at the Governance page to see that
you’ve gone a few weights to far with the font choice.

[https://beta.rust-lang.org/governance](https://beta.rust-lang.org/governance)

------
nixpulvis
I don't hate it, but I do miss the similarity the old site had to the rest of
the ecosystems documentation. I'm glad to see more information added though.

------
nachtigall
This new site looks really awesome and really got me into why not trying rust
the next time I'll write a hundred LOC bash script.

Much better than the previous version. I had a Wow effect yesterday on mobile
and now seeing it again on desktop, it's till wow! Strange that there are so
many negative arguments here.

Also really interesting to learn about the fireflower problem - there's some
truth in it! Applicable to so many things in live...

------
anoncake
That slogan, with the emphasised "everyone", reads to me like "The systems
programming language for idiots".

------
juststeve
sorry, too much happening on the page for me. not wild about the colour
scheme.

it looks fresh, but it's a lot of colours all at once sorry.

~~~
juststeve
less is more for me

------
whalesalad
Missed opportunity for some circa-2005 rusty photoshop tutorials in action
here.
[https://photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/rust/rust.htm](https://photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/rust/rust.htm)

------
riccardomc
Doesn't the "small Rust application" at the bottom of the page lack an "extern
crate ferris_says;"? I know very little about Rust, but I cannot get the
example to work without that...

~~~
steveklabnik
Rust 2018 does not require extern crate anymore (except in certain very
limited circumstances); when this page goes live, that will work. Or you can
try it out on beta.

~~~
Twisol
For those curious (like me), this is described in the upcoming Edition Guide
at [https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/edition-
guide/rust-2018/...](https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/edition-
guide/rust-2018/module-system/path-clarity.html) .

~~~
steveklabnik
And the exceptions, yet to be described in the guide:
[https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/edition-
guide/issues/12...](https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/edition-
guide/issues/121)

------
amckinlay
The new design looks like it was made in Microsoft Word.

------
kreutzwj
I don't see any support for switching human language on the beta site. Having
the ability to switch on the page itself helps a lot.

~~~
steveklabnik
As we said in the post, that’s because the translations aren’t ready yet. When
they are, we’ll make it obvious.

~~~
kreutzwj
Sorry, I must of missed that in the post before looking.

~~~
steveklabnik
It’s all good!

------
fishtank
The colors are great, really comfortable contrast level, and the typeface is
easy to read. Fairly tight information density, but low-density layouts are a
common complaint with the target audience so I think it strikes a good
balance. My compliments to the designer.

------
federicoponzi
I think it's beautiful! :)

------
k__
Haha, someone read Badass

------
timwis
I love it!

------
alexandernst
I guess that's the result when a Rust developer does the job of a Web dev.

~~~
revskill
Is it a compliment ?

------
pornel
The new text is a great improvement over previous programming language theory
jargon.

~~~
boatadventure
Yeah who wants to hear programming language jargon when looking up a
programming language

------
hartror
Love the new design, it adds a feel to the project that many others lack.

Compare it to [https://www.python.org/](https://www.python.org/) for example
which is perfectly functional but squint and you could be on any page on the
internet.

------
peapicker
If it empowered everyone, it would be available on other OSes than Linux,
Windows, and macos (ok, it is available on Android and iOS apparently and some
*BSD variants too).

I'd love to use Rust - but my business requires support for, (in addition to
Linux and Windows), Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and OS400 for me to serve my customer
base.

Rust can't empower me there, it simply isn't available.

~~~
steveklabnik
There are people working on it! Debian is now shipping 14 architectures. The
big show-stopper is if LLVM has support for a particular bit of hardware. OSes
are easier. We need people who know these systems to help out. It's not easy,
but we'll get there.

