Rust and Go Backlash Unfiltered | Generated by AI

Home 2026.02

Question: Analyze this Weibo post in English.

Answer:

The Weibo post (from February 2026 or earlier context) is a strongly opinionated, personal rant by an apparently retired/senior programmer expressing deep frustration and disdain toward the hype cycles, community cultures, and technical choices surrounding two popular modern languages: Go (earlier wave) and Rust (current wave).

Core Claims and Arguments

  1. Historical Parallel: Go → Rust
    The author sees Rust’s current dominance and fan enthusiasm as a repeat of what happened with Go around 2010–2015. Both languages experienced (or are experiencing) explosive popularity, heavy marketing through meetups/hackathons, and a community atmosphere the author finds arrogant and unwelcoming.

  2. Technical Criticism
    • Go:
      Solves mainly one thing well (lightweight concurrency via goroutines), but deliberately omits many “good” features from prior languages (generics — added much later; exceptions; etc.). This leads to verbose, repetitive, error-prone code. The author claims Go codebases become chaotic and worse than well-written C in practice. With many older languages now offering async/await or similar lightweight concurrency, Go has lost its unique selling point.
    • Rust:
      Overly complex design. The borrow checker and ownership model, while solving memory safety, impose heavy cognitive load and distract from the actual business problem. The author believes it does not elegantly solve memory management and instead creates new classes of difficulty.
  3. Community & Culture Critique (Main Theme)
    • Language-specific meetups repeatedly disappoint: instead of deep technical discussion, they feature self-important speakers who brag about their background (e.g., “I used Haskell before, now Rust makes me elite”).
    • Anecdotes:
      • Go meetup attendee condescendingly asking “Why are you here if you don’t use Go?”
      • Rust speaker in Tokyo acting dominant (knocking on table).
      • A former “Haskell programmer” colleague who caused long delays, produced questionable designs, and later switched to zealously promoting Rust without delivering useful results.
    • Broader pattern: People who constantly emphasize which language they use tend to be lower-quality engineers. Companies that loudly advertise “We use Go/Rust” often have unpleasant, dogmatic atmospheres.
    • Prediction: Rust will produce similar negative outcomes (over-engineering, toxic internal culture, stalled projects) as previously seen with Scala and Go.
  4. Personal Stance & Motivation
    The author admits bias (openly calls Go “shit”, expects similar for Rust). They have written critical evaluations of Go and Scala before, and some readers (e.g., ex-Twitter employee) later confirmed the Scala critique matched reality.
    Now “retired” and free from job-seeking, the post serves as a warning / catharsis for people still suffering in such environments.
    Invites others to share real Go/Rust experiences to test whether the intuition holds.

Overall Tone and Style

Very blunt, cynical, and anecdotal — relies heavily on personal stories rather than systematic evidence. Uses strong language (“arrogant”, “self-important”, “教条主义”/dogmatic, etc.) and shows clear contempt for language evangelism / tribalism.

Is This View Uncommon?

No — similar complaints have circulated for years in English-speaking communities:

In short, the post is a classic representative of the “old-school grizzled programmer vs. modern language hype” genre — skeptical of fashion-driven adoption, distrustful of communities that tie ego to language choice, and convinced that technical simplicity + pragmatism beats feature-heavy “safe” languages when real-world code quality and team dynamics are considered.

References:

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