I get that it's supposed to be a meme, but aside from the first one these aren't even rust stereotypes. Is this a meme specifically for people who haven't used rust, know nothing about rust but have maybe heard that it's a programming language?
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Yeah, part of the point of Rust is that it does exactly what you tell it - sometimes to the point of absurdity. No implicit casting for instance.
And here I was thinking most of our programming problems come from the thing doing exactly what we told it to, but didn't quite think the process through enough. Or at all.
This is for people who learnt C++ in 2008 and refuse to believe that they've never fucked up a malloc in their lives
C++
malloc
You aren't supposed to use malloc in C++ with very few exceptions.
Hah I learned c++ in the 90s and never felt shame for messing up an allocation.
I think when this happens, I have a puddle of memory, the spilled ram “lubricates” the pointers, which often rub against each other. The wasted memory acts like oil does to a rusted chain. It’s helping push the program through the finish line.
Yes, I am having fun here
I mean Rust is definitely known for long compilation times but yeah otherwise I am not sure how any of this is Rust-specific. Maybe by "doesn't do what you tell it to do" they mean the borrow checker and strict compile time checks...?
i've edited the post content for context, and a small puzzle for rust programmers
I was actually wondering if this was supposed to be about a specific problem someone has with rust (not like I haven't gotten stuck on some weird corner with rust before), but looking at the meme, that seemed unlikely to me. Thanks for the context.
output makes no sense
C++ template errors enter the room
Template errors make sense as long as you carefully read the entire error, but nobody has ever actually done that.
You are saying that the error messages terminate at some point?
Well, yeah, templates won't recurse beyond 1,024 levels.
That's an implementation-defined behaviour.
I like to pretend that gcc is the only compiler
boost::msm errors enter the room
So a narrow but clear win for the Rust compiler still...
Deterministic: ✅ ❌
Deterministic when hit by that weird cosmic ray: ❌❌
/jk
cargo() {
cargo $@
echo So how you doin\' today?
}
Fixed
I thought the rust compiler was supposed to be polite and helpful (unlike gcc, or nix).
It is, this meme is just trash.
gcc was unhelpful a couple decades ago. I've found it to be rather helpful in recent years.
Yeah, recent versions of GCC have gotten a lot better. I suspect it’s actually because of languages like Rust raising the bar.
No, Rust came later.
they didn't say otherwise
They literally did. They theorized that Rust influenced GCC's improved error messaging. That could not have happened if GCC improved their error messaging prior to the existence of Rust.
But GCC did not improve their error messages (much) prior to Rust, despite Clang's error messages comparing favorably to GCC even before Rust 1.0 was released, as for example discussed in
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/ClangDiagnosticsComparison?action=recall&rev=1
Rust itself is 14 years old, slightly older than above wiki page, and even back then it had great error messages, though they've also improved since. Here's a fun site where you can see how error messages have evolved through Rust's life:
https://kobzol.github.io/rust/rustc/2025/05/16/evolution-of-rustc-errors.html
It's only very recently that GCC has started to catch up, for example with some nice improvements in GCC 15:
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/04/10/6-usability-improvements-gcc-15
Oh, guess my mental timeline is wrong!
no they didn't, yes it could have happened:
- GCC: exists, not too good messages
- rust gets made
- rust gets popular
- gcc error messages get improved by good example of rust
gcc is not a dead project. it is continuously maintained. its improvements can be influenced by other projects like rust
I know that gcc is still alive. That was implied from my original comment.
What you just outlined is the other commenter's theory I already outlined, and literally describes Rust not coming along after gcc improves its error messaging. Thus, it contradicts my theory that Rust came along later than gcc's improved error messaging.
Oh god nix output
You create a new file and don't check it into git yet.
Nix commands: "I've never met this file in my life!"
cargo delete this_post
You are running into the Send Approximation being too conservative. The compiler does not like to see a let binding for a non-Send type and an .await statement in the same scope. It is not (yet) smart enough to know that the non-Send type is already be consumed by the time of the .await.
You've already discovered the workaround in your three(). To make it more concise
async fn four() {
let content = do_stuff().err().map(|err| err.to_string());
if let Some(content) = content {
let _ = do_stuff_2(content).await;
}
}
This is an awful "meme"
Just a guess, but are you missing + Send on your error type?
Yeah, I was gonna say, that might be the root cause.
In the vast majority of cases, you want Box<dyn Error + Send + Sync>, but folks tend to leave out the Send + Sync, because it looks like additional complexity to them, and because it doesn't cause problems when they're not doing async/await.
It's better to define a type alias, if you don't want that long type name everywhere.
I love the rust compiler, it makes debugging so easy
sometimes?! Cargo never makes sense to me!
First mistake was using async
https://xkcd.com/303/ vs this guy who thinks 20 seconds is a long time
I've done professional work on an old Unix system where the full build was more than 2 hours, and an incremental stop-rebuild-restart cycle was 20 minutes.
You get to where you really stare at your edits for a while before you hit build.
"This could take like a hundred milliseconds. It could even take gasp ONE WHOLE SECOND! 😱"