Marketing for what exactly?
I mean... why would I want this app instead of some other app? Just because it's written in the language of the week? If it said "20% faster than xyz" it would be a much better marketing than saying it's written in rust, even though more than half the code is typescript.
I think there are tangible benefits to this being “not Java or JavaScript”. Or any language that brings a resource intensive runtime with it.
More than half is TypeScript to be fair.
The title also mentions that it’s open source, so it could be marketing for potential contributors.
It's primarily this. I'm a novice Rust developer and really would like to improve the code quality across the board, and some of this comes to attracting the right kind of developers to help. Maybe "Rust" in the title helps, maybe it doesn't. Clearly HN doesn't like it and that's okay.
I stated my need for help on the about page as well
> This is my first Rust project, and it shows. There are bugs, rough edges, and architectural decisions that could be better. I’m documenting the known issues openly because I want everyone to understand what they are getting into, and encourage improvement in the project.
> Maybe "Rust" in the title helps, maybe it doesn't. Clearly HN doesn't like it and that's okay
HN definitely likes it, when it is used in the correct context. Using Rust in the title is a soft promise for better reliability and quality for the software than on average. But it starts to get controversial when Rust is not purely the controlling part of the software anymore. So people start to complain because it can be misleading marketing which is based on the promise that Rust can offer.
Fair enough, most of the critical code in this case is written in Rust. A Rust transcription library popped out of the project `transcription-rs`. And there is a real-time audio library I'd like to put out which allows for filters. I could have called out to ffmpeg or similar, but I chose to implement an audio pipeline myself (for better or worse)
So makes sense, but there are benefits to writing a desktop application backend in Rust for the ecosystem as well.
I'm not sure if it's purely down to "hype".
For me I do tend to prefer apps written in rust/go(/c/etc-copiled) as they are usually less problematic to install (quie often single binary; less headache compared to python stuff for example) and most of the time less resource hungry (anything JS/electron based)... in the end "convenient shortcut to convey aforementioned benefits" :)
It's targeting a very specific group of devs who like to follow trendy stuff..
To that group saying something is "made in rust" is equivalent to saying "it's modern, fast, secure, and made by an expert programmer not some plebe who can't keep up with the times"
> and made by an expert programmer
Quite the opposite. You have to be more of an expert programmer to achieve those same goals in C. Rust lowers the skill bar.
Anyways, I agree that the editorialization here is silly.
But also, I am unashamed that "in Rust" does increase my interest in a piece of software, for several of the reasons you mentioned.