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ansuz
RIIR
OPEN SOURCE2017–2025
ansuz / RIIR

RIIR

why not Rewrite It In Rust

9Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
756GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

why not Rewrite It In Rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-03-31 18:02:40 UTC to 2025-11-21 18:20:32 UTC.

0123452017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

12 sources
It is a weird self-fulfilling thing. People talk about it like it's a thing, so it's a thing, even if there's very little actual evidence of anyone sincerely holding this belief. People repeat that there's this plague of folks requesting that projects be re-written, and while it is literally true that I have seen two or three instances of this (you link to one of them, and notably it is not anyone harassing maintainers about their choices), it's been two or three. I actually got annoyed with this enough that I started doing a quantitative analysis; if you look at the canonical repository tracking this, it's got 44 total issues, most of which are jokes https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues If you search GitHub for issues with these words in it, you get some, but many are either obvious jokes, people making issues on their own projects to th
Read the rest
ink about doing this, and things like that. I never followed through on collecting it into a blog post though. I didn't think your writing was inappropriate at all; memes are memes, and I'm convinced that this one is just never going to die, because it's taken a life of its own, regardless of the underlying truth or not. It is always worth pushing back on this sentiment, even if I don't think Rust specifically tends to actually embody that sentiment very much. (Also: I don't know why you're now being downvoted. Hacker News works in mysterious ways.)
In Maintain It with Zig
Right, but this is what I mean. If this is the best collection of stuff, well, it doesn't make a compelling argument that there is a huge scourge of this around the internet. Even if we assume these are all legit issues, there have been 66 total in the five years this repository has existed. That is a miniscule number. If we actually look at the issues, many of them are not instances of an outsider demanding a project being rewritten in Rust. Let's look at the most recent five issues, to pick a random sample: * https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/62 This is showing a branch that the team themselves made. It is not an outside demand to re-write it in Rust. * https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/59 This one does appear to be legit. Not a ton of drama here, a polite conversation that was closed without issue, even though its existence is ge
Read the rest
nerally a bit annoying, yes. * https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/58 This again is someone who is doing this for their own project. * https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/57 This is a transcription of a joke in a telegram chat. * https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/53 This is a person who opened an issue on this project, but does not appear to have asked upstream about it. * https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/51 This one is amusing, given the article, but again, isn't an upstream request. Let's look at recent closed issues: * https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/67 This is a person who made this issue, then two minutes later, opened an issue being a jerk on the target repo. Yes, that is annoying for the person who had the issue opened, but is hardly an indication that these are real requests. This person is trolling. The next seven most recent closed issues are someone who has just opened issues with random technologies they thought they'd be funny. I was only gonna do five, like the opened issues, but it's clear this is a series, so have a bonus two. So already, we have like, let's round it up: two real issues here, out of fourteen. I am not convinced. (Your hacker news link seems like nonsense to me?)
In Linus Torvalds on where Rust will fit into Linux
Out of those 4.5k issues, 1000 are closed. 2600 of them are on Rust repositories. Clicking on the first other one, "shell", the very first result is on the Rust RFCs repo. Let's look at the first page overall: https://github.com/TOTBWF/SteamCurses/issues/16 is someone who is making an issue on their own project because they are interested in a Rust re-write. https://github.com/acrisci/i3-style/pull/38 is someone who has a PR open on their own project to re-write in Rust. https://github.com/mintsuki/storm/issues/2 is someone being obnoxious, sure. Not serious, but you could also say it's annoying. https://github.com/tkaden4/karat/issues/2 is someone on their own repo. https://github.com/jezen/is-thirteen/issues/582 is already on a joke project, so it's also a joke. https://github.com/dadrian/whereiszakir/issues/4 is someone on their own pr
Read the rest
oject. https://github.com/adangert/telegram-events-bot/issues/1 does seem like an actual random person making a real suggestion. https://github.com/spencereir/pharbot/issues/1 is being meme-y so probably not serious, still annoying. https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues/35 is on a repo specifically to track this phenomenon. It has 35 issues open. Many of which aren't actually examples of people saying this. https://github.com/jezen/is-thirteen/issues/497 is a second issue on the joke project above. ------------------------------ So, yes. Out of 900 possible issues, in the top 10, one may be a serious request, and two are shitposting, which may be annoying as well, admittedly, but is just as likely to come from people complaining about this as from "The rust community" broadly. At that level, it's effectively noise.
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