Rust Semicolons Are Different

The C++ Olympic gold medalist celebrates victory in the first 5 panels, only to get absolutely destroyed by Rust in the final frame. Classic story of our industry - spend decades mastering pointer arithmetic and manual memory management, then some new language comes along with a borrow checker and suddenly you're obsolete. C++17 promised better memory safety features, but let's be honest - it's like putting a band-aid on a chainsaw wound. Meanwhile Rust sits on the podium smugly preventing segfaults at compile time while every other garbage-collected language watches from second place. Ten years of debugging dangling pointers and suddenly I'm supposed to learn ownership semantics? Fine, I'll update my resume.

In Rust, you have to explicitly mark code as unsafe when you're about to do something that might summon demons from the ninth circle of memory hell. Meanwhile in C++, the entire language is basically one giant unsafe block where dangling pointers and buffer overflows are just part of the authentic experience. It's like driving a car with no seatbelts, airbags, or brakes—but hey, at least it's fast! The irony is that in C++, the unsafe part is invisible—it's just assumed you enjoy living dangerously. Rust at least has the courtesy to make you type out "I know what I'm doing" before it lets you shoot yourself in the foot.

Ah, the classic beginner's dilemma. You're just trying to pick up coding, overwhelmed by the buffet of languages spread before you—Python, JavaScript, C#, Java—each one promising to be the one . Meanwhile, seasoned devs are in the corner cackling with their Rust bottles like some coding cult. The truth? After 15 years in this industry, I've watched languages come and go faster than startup CEOs after funding runs out. The beginners panic about which pill to swallow while the veterans know the real drug was memory safety and zero-cost abstractions all along. Rust is like that friend who does CrossFit—they won't shut up about it, but damn if they aren't in better shape than the rest of us garbage-collected peasants.

Learning a new programming language is like driving this backwards SUV. You think you're moving forward, but everything is just... wrong. The syntax looks vaguely familiar, yet somehow completely backwards from what you're used to. First week with Rust after 10 years of Python and suddenly I'm fighting with the borrow checker like I'm trying to parallel park this monstrosity. "But this worked in my previous language!" Yeah, and cars are supposed to have their engines in the front, yet here we are.

Why fix what's broken when you can just throw it away and build it again from scratch in Rust? Developers turning their noses up at the sensible option of refactoring existing code because the siren call of rewriting everything in a shiny new language is just too tempting. Sure, it'll take 6 months longer, introduce 47 new bugs, and the business stakeholders will be pulling their hair out, but hey—at least you'll get to tell everyone at meetups that you're "memory safe" now.

Ah, the GitHub language breakdown for side projects – where BASIC somehow makes up 11.1% of your codebase despite not touching it since 1997. Let's not forget the 9% Beef (a real language, but probably just your angry comments), 6.5% Rust because you watched that one YouTube tutorial, whatever "मादरचोद" is (probably what you shouted at 3 AM when nothing compiled), C89 from that algorithm you copy-pasted, and Albanian because... why not? The remaining 56.3% is just unclassified Stack Overflow snippets you're hoping nobody notices. Side projects: where programming languages go to either die or reproduce uncontrollably.