I was a young, hopeful Rust
fanatic. On paper, Rust
seemed like the programming
languages designed by the
gods.
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I was a young, hopeful
Rust fanatic. On paper,
Rust seemed like the
programming languages
designed by the gods.
Not only is it the
fastest programming
language out there, its
also one of the
safest.
I’m not alone in
thinking Rust was this
perfect language. If you
read about the Rust
programming language
online, you’ll likely
encounter overwhelmingly
positive opinions. Every
guide on Medium, every
post on Reddit, every
answer on Stack
Overflow — everything is
glowing.
GitHub post about Rust
being the most admired
language among
developers
Given this, I decided
to migrate away from
TypeScript re-write my
entire
open-source
algorithmic trading
system in Rust.
GitHub -
austin-starks/NextTrade:
A system that
performs algorithmic
trading
A system that
performs
algorithmic
trading.
Contribute to
austin-starks/NextTrade
development by
creating an
account on…
I gave Rust a neutral
rating before. I take
that back
I Built an
Algorithmic Trading
System in Rust.
Here’s What I
Regret.
If you read about
the Rust
programming
language online, I
guarantee that
you’ll only read
positive things.
I wrote about my
experience with Rust 4
months ago. In my last
article, I concluded
that while I really like
the speed and some
aspects of the language
design (such as enums
and strong typing), I
didn’t really
love the language. My
article was met with
harsh criticism on
Reddit, including one
highly upvoted comment
that accused me of using
ChatGPT to write my
article.
Me having to defend
myself against angry Rust
fanatics on Reddit
After posting, I had
thought that I didn’t
give Rust a fair shot.
Maybe I was just naive,
or came in with
misplaced
expectations.
Now, after working with
the language for a
little while longer, I
can confidently make one
conclusion…
This language
absolutely fucking
sucks.
Anthropic Dominates
OpenAI: A
Side-by-Side
Comparison of Claude
3.5 Sonnet and
GPT-4o
Anthropic is
beating OpenAI at
their own game.
Austin Starks ∙ 9
min read ∙ View on
Medium Anthropic
Dominates OpenAI…
What I DESPISE About
Rust
If you want to find an
article about what’s
right with Rust, look
literally anywhere on
the internet. You’ll be
hard-pressed to find
anything less than
neutral about the
language. This article
will be a focused rant
about what I despise
about this crabby
language.
The Rust Mascot is a
Crab. Get it? Because its
crappy
Horrendous, verbose,
unintuitive syntax and
semantics
An example of a complex
Rust function
Anybody who ever said
that Rust doesn’t have
atrocious semantics is
lying to your face.
There are certain things
where, if you don’t have
access to an extremely
powerful Large Language
Model, then writing the
function becomes
literally impossible. I
don’t want to spend 90
minutes figuring out the
where
clause in my
run_transaction
function. I just want to
write my damn
function.
In the end, I had to
abandon the idea of a
helper function
entirely, because I
quite literally couldn’t
get the code to compile.
What people claim as
Rust’s biggest strength
(a strict compiler to
eliminate errors) is one
of Rust’s biggest flaws.
Just give me a garbage
collector, and let me do
what I want to do!
In contrast, if I were
writing this exact same
function in Go, it would
look something like
this:
The Go implementation of
the function
While the core of the
function remains
relatively the same, you
don’t have to do
backflips to figure out
how to make the dang
code work. It just
works!
Six Years Ago, this
Redditor proposed
"the Neckbeard
Index".
It's DEMOLISHING
the Market
I was scrolling
Reddit to get
backtest ideas for
my algorithmic
trading platform.
Long ago, I had
heard of "the
White…
Horrendous Error
Handling
Rust does do some very
nice things with errors.
As long as you avoid
unsafe
unwraps , you can be damn sure
that the code will run
and keep running.
NilPointerExceptions and
unhandled errors just
don’t happen anymore.
Yay! (right?)
Wrong. Because when
your data is wrong or
something unexpectedly
happens, you will be
FIGHTING
to figure out what the
hell happened. Maybe I’m
just an idiot and can’t
figure out how to enable
stack traces. But when
an error happens in my
application,
I have no idea
why!
Where the hell is my
stack trace???
In contrast, with a
language like Python,
you get these beautiful,
art-like stack traces
that tell you
exactly
what happened, down to
the line number! Even in
Go, you have
errors.Wrap(...) , which enable you to
look at the entire error
stack in your
application. Perhaps I’m
a goddamn idiot, because
when I encounter an
error in Rust, I’m in
Lala land tryna figure
out what the hell
happened. I need an
eprintln!(...)
littered throughout my
application.
In fact, no, I’m not an
idiot. This is a flawed
language design.
If you can’t beat
them… steal their
idea. Creating a
better algotrading
system
My business
started off as a
passion project.
medium.datadriveninvestor.com
Crabby Community
Hot take: the Rust
community isn’t as nice
and cool as they pretend
to be. They’re a bunch
of narcissistic assholes
that hate being told
that their favorite
language has
flaws.
An example of a rustaceon
providing “”helpful””
advice to my
question
For example, I asked a
question on the Rust
subreddit about how to
improve error handling
with the MongoDB Rust
crate. My answers ranged
from:
-
Switch to Postgres
(yeah, like I’m going
to re-design my entire
database because of
some crappy error
messages)
-
Why am I using
MongoDB at all? (I
like it. Next
question?)
-
MongoDB is bad in Go
and Python too (Maybe
it is, maybe it isn’t.
It’s fine in
TypeScript, and your
whataboutism doesn’t
answer my
question)
-
(Rare)
An actually helpful
suggestion to improve
the error
messages
There is no other
programming community
that’s as cult-like as
Rust. They ignore all of
the giant glaring flaws
with the language, like
its crazy learning
curve, verbosity,
horrible error messages,
crazy syntax and
questionable language
design choices; they’d
rather say it’s a skill
issue with the
developer. That’s insane
to me!
Final Words
With all of this being
said, Rust has some
pros. It’s fast and….
well, that’s mainly
it.
I guess it’s also safe
too. If we compare it to
C++, it’s obviously the
better language. But
when compared with other
languages (like Go), its
“safety” to me is more
of a detriment. I’d
rather my application
take a few dozen
milliseconds longer to
run if it means my
development time is cut
in half.
On the bright side, if
I chose to write my app
in Go, I’d also probably
have some regret. “What if it could be
faster?”
I’d think to myself.
“There’s yet another
article about how Rust
is the best thing
since sliced bread. Oh
geez. I made a
mistake!”
At the very least, now
that I know Rust, I feel
like I can learn
anything. Maybe I’ll
pick up OCaml for the
hell of it. It can’t be
too much worse than
Rust, can it?
···
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NexusTrade -
AI-Powered
Algorithmic Trading
Platform
By far the best
algorithmic
trading
experience. Learn
to conquer the
markets by
deploying
algorithmic
trading…
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