Rust Isn’t the Future — It’s Just Hype

Rust is the programming equivalent of a luxury sports car that spends 99% of its time stuck in traffic — technically impressive, completely impractical, and owned by people who won’t shut up about it. ☁️ Whenever I write about cloud costs or DevOps, these are some of the quick guides I reference often:
• DevOps Interview Guide — 408 Questions → https://gumroad.com/a/416513171/ctqbrx
• AWS DevOps Interview Q&A → https://gumroad.com/a/416513171/oxwom
• Learn Terraform in Minutes → https://gumroad.com/a/416513171/wifux
• Ansible Mastery: Automate in 20 Steps → https://gumroad.com/a/416513171/hzclyp Perfect if you like understanding the why behind automation, not just the YAML. There, I said it. While the Rust evangelists are busy rewriting their TODO apps for the seventh time and patting themselves on the back for “memory safety,” the rest of us are actually shipping products that millions of people use. Let me break down why Rust is nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes of the programming world.

1. The Learning Curve Is a Productivity Killer Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Rust’s learning curve isn’t steep — it’s a vertical cliff. The borrow checker, lifetimes, trait bounds, and the arcane incantations required to appease the compiler turn what should be simple tasks into multi-hour debugging sessions. Discord famously rewrote their Read States service from Go to Rust and everyone celebrated. What they conveniently left out? The months of developer time, the specialized knowledge required, and the fact that they could have achieved similar performance gains by simply optimizing their Go code or switching to a more efficient algorithm. But sure, let’s pretend that rewriting everything in Rust is a better use of engineering resources than actually building features customers want. The Rust community loves to say “if it compiles, it works.” What they don’t tell you is that getting it to compile requires a PhD-level understanding of type theory and the patience of a saint. Meanwhile, Python developers are deploying working applications before Rust developers finish arguing with the compiler about lifetimes. 2. The Ecosystem Is a Fragmented Mess Node has npm. Python has PyPI. Java has Maven Central. These are mature, stable ecosystems with libraries that have been battle-tested by millions of developers over decades. Rust has crates.io — a collection of half-finished projects, abandoned experiments, and libraries with 47 different ways to do the same thing, none of them compatible with each other. Want async functionality? Choose between Tokio, async-std, or smol. They’re all different, incompatible, and the Rust community can’t even agree on which one is “the right choice.” Need to make HTTP requests? Good luck navigating the maze of reqwest, hyper, actix-web, and whatever new framework appeared this week. Every six months the “best practices” completely change, and your production code becomes legacy before you’ve even finished the code review. The Go standard library gives you everything you need out of the box. Rust gives you homework and tells you to figure it out yourself. 3. “Rewrite It In Rust” Is a Meme, Not a Strategy The Rust cult has convinced themselves that every piece of software ever written needs to be rewritten in Rust. They’ve infected open-source projects with the mantra of “Rewrite It In Rust” (RIIR) like it’s some kind of religious awakening. Newsflash: Most software doesn’t need to be rewritten. Most software doesn’t have memory safety issues. Most software is not performance-critical enough to justify throwing away years of stability, bug fixes, and domain knowledge just to chase the dopamine hit of using the “cool new language.” The Linux kernel added Rust support in 2022, and the Rust zealots acted like they’d won the war. Fast forward to today, and the vast majority of kernel development is still happening in C — because experienced kernel developers recognize that C, despite its flaws, is a known quantity with four decades of tooling, knowledge, and stability. Rust in the kernel isn’t a revolution; it’s a novelty that will occupy a tiny niche at best. 4. Corporate Adoption Is Marketing, Not Endorsement “But Microsoft is using Rust! Google is using Rust! Amazon is using Rust!” Yes, and they’re also using Haskell, Erlang, and Fortran somewhere in their multi-billion line codebases. Companies that employ tens of thousands of engineers can afford to experiment with every language under the sun. That doesn’t make Rust the future — it makes it Tuesday. Microsoft isn’t rewriting Windows in Rust. Google isn’t rewriting Google Search in Rust. Amazon isn’t rewriting AWS in Rust. They’re using it for small, isolated components where it makes sense — and continuing to use Java, Python, Go, and C++ for everything else. When a company like Meta or Google mentions Rust in a blog post, they’re doing PR, not providing a roadmap for the industry. They know the dev community will generate free marketing hype, and they’re happy to throw out breadcrumbs to keep the conversation going. The Counterarguments Are Weak “But memory safety!” C++ has smart pointers, RAII, and modern practices that eliminate most memory safety issues. If your team can’t write safe C++, they won’t magically write safe Rust either — they’ll just fight the borrow checker instead of fixing their architecture. “But performance!” Go, Java, and C++ are fast enough for 99.9% of use cases. The difference between 2ms and 1ms latency means nothing to your users, but it means weeks of lost productivity to your team. “But it’s the most loved language on Stack Overflow!” Being loved by hobbyists and consultants who get paid by the hour doesn’t translate to industry dominance. PHP is still running most of the internet, JavaScript is still the language of the web, and Python is still the king of data science and AI. Where’s Rust in those battles? Nowhere. The Uncomfortable Truth Here’s what Rust really is: a fantastic language for a narrow set of problems — embedded systems, systems programming, performance-critical components — used by people who pretend it’s the solution to everything. Rust isn’t replacing JavaScript. It isn’t replacing Python. It isn’t replacing Java. It’s not even replacing C++ in most places. It’s carving out a small niche and declaring victory while the rest of the industry continues building real products in practical languages that don’t require a master’s degree to understand. The Rust hype train is powered by developers who conflate technical sophistication with practical utility, who mistake compiler errors for correctness, and who have convinced themselves that everyone else is doing it wrong. You can hate me, but deep down you know I’m right. While you’re busy fighting the borrow checker and rewriting your perfectly functional code for the third time, the rest of us will be shipping features, delighting customers, and using tools that actually make us productive. Rust isn’t the future. It’s just another tool that the industry will eventually place exactly where it belongs: in the toolbox alongside all the other specialized instruments, useful for specific jobs, but not the hammer for every nail.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/codeelevation/rust-isnt-the-future-it-s-just-hype-3ba9b9334e62