The fact that the software being written in Rust is supposed to be valuable information to be put in the title is interesting.
Nobody would say “Performant intracontinental public transport routing in C++”, or any other combination. It’s just something around the Rust language.
A quick search of “c++” on HN shows many C++ related posts explicitly mention the language. I would assume many other language specific posts also name the language they’re using to save uninterested parties a click. There’s really nothing particularly interesting about this: it’s a fairly natural pattern in a multilingual community like HN.
Obviously it's rarer with C++ than with Rust, but it happens in the same proportion with pretty much every language when its on a popularity boom (we've seen that with JavaScript a decade ago, then Go and python, now Rust).
Well, aside from the fact that people do say "in C++"... the fact that it is written in Rust is novel. Rust is still quite a lot less common than C++.
If you were reading an article about a concrete bridge you wouldn't expect "New bridge built out of concrete!" would you? But "New bridge built from 3D printed stainless steel!" is a perfectly reasonable title.
It depends on a number of factors, one of which is how the authors perceive the work. Does it stand on its own merits or is it interesting because of the technical decisions? Sometimes it starts as a technical exploration and outgrows itself faster than the author can come to terms with the magnitude of the work.
Nobody would say “Performant intracontinental public transport routing in C++”, or any other combination. It’s just something around the Rust language.