it's so tiring that every time there's a post about something being implemented in Zig or C or C++, the Rust brigade shows up trying to pick up a fight.
It’s a site where programming nerds congregate to waste time arguing with each other. Where do you think you are?
This same pattern used to play out with Ruby, Lisp, and other languages in different eras of this site. It will probably never stop and calling it out seems to just fan the flames more than anything else.
As part of the "all software should be liable brigade", it is a matter of misplaced goals after the cybersecurity agencies started looking into the matter.
It is legacy decisions going back decades. Thirty years ago, you did not have a wealth of database alternatives. You picked Oracle and built the business around it. More and more business processes accumulate around the data store, all using some proprietary Oracle extensions. Eventually, the thought of disentangling the dependency is so daunting you are locked in forever until an existential risk materializes.
In 1998 I worked for a small nasdaq company that had a successful software as a service product that was growing quickly.
We used Clarion and MSSQL7 on windows because it was cheap. Since we started making real money, some figured we could finally afford Oracle and Sun (back when they were different).
I was a junior so my job was to evaluate the migration of one of our sql servers to oracle to test it out. I talks with the Oracle team who helps people plan purchases. They took my transaction level (~100M/year) and size (1-2GB/year) and came back with $1M for the system. This replaced a functioning $10k server. And we had maybe a dozen that would have to eventually move.
When I told them the current server was $10k, they revised their estimate to $100k. I recommended we not move.
I left the company a little while later and I think they ended up buying lots of Oracle.
Companies have money and don’t mind spending on useless stuff.
In my experience, it is from technical management in medium/big companies you'll listen some good things about Oracle as a database product (regardless of its actual merits), like stability, scalability, compliance checks, and other "enterprisy" features (like database encryption). Also, it is offered as a default database option for many enterprise applications from their vendors.
While many people points to Postgresql as "the alternative", in many places outside USA its commercial support is not available, or too limited.
Other commercial alternatives (like MSSQL) have the (more or less) the same bad reputation regarding licensing costs.
A few years ago I had the head of a devops team at a large company say that the project I was working on should switch from postgres to a "real" enterprise database like oracle. This happened while we were having zero issues with postgres, it was a perfect fit for our case, and it wasn't even relevant to the conversation. He just saw that's what we were using and reflexively thought that of course we should use Oracle.
It blew my mind at the time. Oracle is so widely hated among developers, entirely justifiably, that this guy's take really shocked me. I've literally never heard another glowing recommendation for that company before or since.
My old boss literally said they don't trust other databases. I tried to push for postgres. But they insisted only oracle is professional. Our software only worked with an oracle backend. I no longer work there.
Isn't the whole "thing" about JPA (and all other ORMs ever) that you're supposed to "use it" instead of directly doing well optimized native queries on your database so that you can jump ship if the database provider turns out to be shit?
Nah everything we did was hand crafted for their specific db.
It was particularly bad because it was a very small family business with equally small customers. And they all had to buy oracle licenses first, which made us insanely expensive without making money lol.
On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, on my region, "Oracle Database - Base Database Service" (single node database) costs the same as a much more powerful cluster of managed "Database with PostgreSQL", or a managed cluster of "MySQL HeatWave".
Under most circumstances, you should still pick non-oracle-DB on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Single-sign on, in-person support, certificated software, offering training courses to onboard people, undeletable logs, help with upgrading major versions..
All from a single vendor so you can pick up the phone, yell "fix it" and go on with your day.
It's interesting how much Rust has slowed down. There is still some development in linux otherwise people seem to be over it. I think Rust just doesn't offer enough in terms of features, and is overshadowed by languages like Go or C++ in terms of what developers are really looking for. Rust's popularity seems to be dropping or holding steady in indexes like TIOBE, and a lot of big "influencers" seem to be over Rust's hype cycle
> Rust's popularity seems to be dropping or holding steady in indexes like TIOBE, and a lot of big "influencers" seem to be over Rust's hype cycle
It is correct that the hype is past its peak, however, the TIOBE trend (if one wants to use that) is actually steadily increasing.
> There is still some development in linux
"Some development" is a miscarachterization - the official addition to the Linux kernel itself is a very big deal, and its adoption is increasing and will continue to do so.
I think that Rust has found its niche in safe low-level programming, and it will slowly have an increasingly dominant role in (although the ceiling of this area is certainly limited in the global landscape).
Here's my 2 cents - a programming language (or any technology, smartphones, LLMs etc) has a honeymoon phase - during which everyone's excited about it and extols its virtues and focuses on how different it is from everything else.
Once that's over, people start looking at it with a more pragmatic eye - how much better is this really than what I had before. People start focusing less on the gimmicks and more on everyday usability.
For a programming language to be really popular, it needs that something that captures people's imaginations, but ultimately the stay power is determined by how useful it turns out.
Kotlin and Swift are very practical, but never had any wow features, so they never got hyped, they just quietly got more popular. Go had it with its green threads and channels, but nowadays most people seem to be not using those that much (I don't think there are a ton of instances of Go processes in prod with 10k threads), but otherwise its a solid language.
Rust - it's a solid language as well, and an improvement over C++ in some aspects like package management, but it's borrow checker and programming style is divisive.
Thing is, unlike goroutines there's no avoiding the borrow checker, so a lot of people don't really commit to Rust.
> Go had it with its green threads and channels, but nowadays most people seem to be not using those that much (I don't think there are a ton of instances of Go processes in prod with 10k threads)
Err..this is incorrect. Some projects who scale to 10k go-routines on a single instance regularly are loki and CockroachDB. Even your common NATS server can scale 5k+ go-routines on single instance and it is not uncommon.
Think it's a matter of if a person is limiting themselves to an evangelistic echo chamber. If one confined themselves to only HN, likely to get the impression from the enthusiastic fans of Rust and Zig, that they ranked #1 and #2, where in the real world that's definitely not the case. Languages like C# (#5) and Golang (#11), rank way above Rust in the real world, but get way less shine than would be expected. It's like being a heretic, for even mentioning Object Pascal (#8), Ada (#17), or Kotlin (#20) around here. Yet, all those rank above Zig (#49). Hell, Vlang (#41) is ranked above Zig on TIOBE (November 2025).
There appears to be a lot of noise in the Tiobe already. What does it mean if Visual Basic is shooting up and C is near the top? They are surely in no way measuring the same programming market -- so who cares?
I feel like I'm on another planet here. Basically every new piece of software in my space (DB/query engines/streaming engines) is being written in Rust these days. There are like three production projects, total, written in Zig.
Same! I feel like I'm on crazy pills. Multiple folks in this thread are saying stuff like, "yeah, Rust, cool, but it has zero use". How are Linux, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, Firefox, Python's `cryptography`, etc., not real use?
Rust is targeted at strategically important systems (proxies, databases, OSs, VMs, hypervisors, high-throughput servers, cryptography, browsers) and by any measure is making significant inroads into those kinds of systems in real industrial applications, and I'm to believe that Rust adoption is languishing? Am I going insane?
I hear this a lot, but there are many things for which you can use both, so they're competitors. Also most Rust developers want to use it everywhere, including areas where you normally reach out to C, so if people that like Rust want to use it for things that are usually made with C, and Zig is a replacement for C, it seems to me they're competitors, no?
Hono is a server-side framework like Express. So same way like you handle application state in most server-side multi-page web apps: You just fetch whatever you need from the DB per request.
"State management" really isn't that much of an issue on the server. Only on clients, when you need to map state changes to DOM updates.
“The fact that the EU interior ministers want to exempt police officers, soldiers, intelligence officers and even themselves from chat control scanning proves that they know exactly just how unreliable and dangerous the snooping algorithms are that they want to unleash on us citizens,” commented Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer.
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