The Dual Life Of Rust Evangelists

The C++ programmer's 3 AM nightmare in full display. First the Rust evangelists tell you your beloved language is "unsafe" and you need to switch. Then they warn that all your code will be rewritten in Rust anyway, so prepare for unemployment. Finally, the dream escalates to its horrifying conclusion: "QUIT HAVING FUN" – because how dare you enjoy your pointer arithmetic and manual memory management? It's the programming equivalent of vegans telling meat-eaters they'll die of heart disease while you're just trying to enjoy your steak. Meanwhile, the C++ dev lies awake, haunted by the thought that maybe – just maybe – they should learn Rust before their GitHub contributions become vintage artifacts in the Computer History Museum.

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.

The first two panels show our protagonist happily accepting normal entry point functions in Rust and C/C++. "Yeah, that makes sense!" she cheerfully exclaims. Then panel three hits with Python's bizarre if __name__ == '__main__': pattern - the cursed incantation every Python dev has blindly copy-pasted a thousand times without questioning why we need this arcane check just to run a damn script. And that final panel? Pure existential horror. Seven years into my career and I still type this abomination with muscle memory while silently wondering who hurt the Python designers.

Rust evangelists: *screeching intensifies* when they discover 19.11% of Rust libraries use the unsafe keyword, while C++ sits smugly at the dinner table knowing it doesn't need to mark anything as unsafe because everything is potentially unsafe by default. It's like bragging about having 19.11% of your codebase labeled "might explode" while C++ just assumes you're smart enough to know the whole thing is a minefield. Memory safety theater at its finest!

The existential crisis moment when you realize all those fancy programming languages (Ada, F#, Rust, Zig, Swift, C) are just elaborate facades for LLVM! Your entire coding career has been a lie—you've been writing glorified LLVM IR with extra steps. That beautiful syntax you've been obsessing over? Just syntactic sugar before the compiler dragon devours it all and spits out the same machine code. Next you'll tell me my mechanical keyboard is just a fancy input device!

The programming language family drama we never asked for but definitely deserve! Your crush codes in Python (easy, flexible, popular), but her dad is a C++ veteran (strict, powerful, intimidating). Meanwhile, her brother's over there with Java (corporate, verbose), and her crush is into Rust (modern, safe, hipster-approved). And there's you... coding in Brainfuck, the programming equivalent of communicating exclusively through hieroglyphics and morse code combined. Nothing says "I'm technically brilliant but make questionable life choices" quite like mastering a language made of nothing but plus signs, brackets, and dots. The dating pool in computer science just got exponentially more complicated!