alt Hacker NewsNo matter how I look at this, it's churn for the sake of churn.
Even if the translation was free and into ideal idiomatic Rust (and it's obviously not - it's now Zig with Rust syntax) then this would be churn for the sake of churn.
At some project scale the language really stops being any limiting factor, and you're instead mostly dealing with working past past architectural decisions, integration of large changes, deep optimization, steering the codebase into alignment with project roadmaps and long-term goals, regression testing as features get introduced, maintenance of multiple release trains... Experienced software engineers mostly stop caring about simple things like the programming language choice at that point, because whatever issues come from that choice have already been resolved. What matters is stability, careful orchestration of large changes and a stable and comprehensive test suite.
The "idiomatic Rust" thing rubs me the wrong way. If someone writes Rust that compiles and works, that's Rust. full stop. Telling people it doesn't count until it's "idiomatic" is just gatekeeping. It quietly says you're not a real Rust dev until you've put in years and absorbed all the unwritten rules, which shuts out exactly the people who are still learning. Everyone writes "non-idiomatic" code when they start. That's not a failure, that's how learning works. Even if being written by LLMs, the devs still will need to improve their knowledge to keep the codebase.