The Rust Developer's Social Calendar

Kid: "Can we stop and get some C++?" Mom: "We have C++ at home." The C++ at home? Rust with its infamous borrow checker slapping you with unsafe fn main() warnings every time you try to do literally anything fun with memory. It's like asking for a sports car and getting a tank with 47 seatbelts and a breathalyzer. Sure, it'll get you there... after you fill out the proper paperwork in triplicate and promise not to touch anything shiny.

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.

The classic "Flex Tape" solution meme, but make it programming! Some manager somewhere is watching performance tank because of "mediocre developers" and "slow code due to inefficient algorithms" when suddenly—BAM!—someone slaps on "REWRITING TO RUST" like it's magical duct tape that'll fix everything. Spoiler alert: Throwing a trendy language at architectural problems is like putting racing stripes on a broken car. Sure, your memory management will be safer, but those same mediocre developers will just write mediocre Rust code instead. The compiler will scream, deadlines will extend, and somewhere a project manager's eye is twitching violently.

The classic "create your own job security" maneuver. Taking a job where Rust isn't required, then sneakily rewriting a problematic component in your favorite language is the corporate equivalent of moving into someone's house and slowly replacing all their furniture. Before they know it, you're not just living there—you own the place. This is how tech evangelism works in the trenches. No fancy conference talks, just guerrilla warfare: "Oh that critical component that kept breaking? I fixed it... in Rust. Now nobody else can maintain it but me. Checkmate, management." And the 270 upvotes? That's 270 developers who've either done this or are taking notes.

Finally, someone said the quiet part out loud. Every time management pushes for a shiny new tech stack, my bank account feels a disturbance in the force. That moment when your 15 years of C++ wizardry becomes less valuable than a junior who completed "Rust in 30 Days" on Udemy. Memory safety? More like salary safety... for the company. The tech industry's greatest magic trick: convincing us that rewriting perfectly functional systems is about "innovation" rather than resetting the salary clock. Same playbook as when they renamed "programmers" to "software engineers" to "developers" to "ninjas" - different title, same work, fresh salary bands. Guess I'll start learning Rust while updating my LinkedIn to "Blockchain AI Quantum Rust Developer" to stay relevant until the next language comes to destroy my market value.

Oh look, another Rust evangelist has cornered you at the water cooler. The number "18464028364921" isn't random—it's approximately how many times you've heard someone preach about Rust's memory safety while you're just trying to write your C++ in peace. That gun-to-head feeling is the exact sensation when someone starts their fifth lecture about how Rust prevents null pointer dereferences while you're mentally calculating how much time you've wasted listening instead of shipping code. Sure, memory safety is nice, but so is being left alone with your segmentation faults and pointer arithmetic.