technology

For balance I’d like to say that I found Rust obnoxious. I can see the advantage if you are developing commercial grade drivers or an OS kernel, but otherwise lifetimes and the borrow checker only ever prevent me from doing things I can trivially see are safe, which is annoying.

I’m sure this will piss people off but it’s my experience.

A lot of the syntax is fun, especially pattern matching and error handling. I’m convinced that the way Rust handles traits is the way all languages should handle polymorphism (Allowing you to add methods onto builtin types without polluting the global state? Yes please). The borrow checker is frustrating at times because the set of safe programs is larger than the set of programs written in rust without the use of unsafe. So there can be things you know will work in theory that just won’t compile. But it’s ultimately a fun language to learn.

Not sure exactly what you mean, but Rust is a pleasure to use and it'll change the way you think about coding (even in other languages). It's worth giving it a shot.

As somebody who grew up hacking with C++ (on game engines like Doom and Quake) and has also fucked around a bit with Rust (early Hexbear days), Rust is very cool. There are no redundant header files to write. You don't need to install Gentoo to have proper dependency management. The type system is lightyears ahead of what the drunken 90s stupor over object-oriented programming produced in C++. You don't need to add an extensive non-standard library like Boost to make it usable. Basic shit like iterators work a lot better. Errors can be handled elegantly without having exceptions unwind the stack every time an unexpected result occurs. It has its own learning curve, but whenever it incurs pain it is fairly clear why, and what problems you are circumventing.

The downsides are that compilation units are much larger, incremental compilation is slower, and support for obscure platforms is nowhere close in comparison to C/C++.

I found rust to be a pain in the ass. All the same inconsistent, counter-intuitive, and bloated syntax of C++, but at least some of the bloat is going towards memory safety.

Rust is the future. The website you're on right now is written in Rust. Rust is love, rust is life. My gravestone will be written in Rust. Rust is everything. I love Rust.

I always liked writing C but never really had a reason to learn C++ super deeply. I wrote some for a project for a bit but was moved onto something else. I had previously learned C# and go and wasn't a huge fan of either. C# mostly because windows, Go because they don't let you do weird fun things.

Rust is a neat language because you can do a lot of weird functional stuff in the middle of some dry systems code. Because the compiler is such a stickler, you end up fixing most dumb mistakes from the get go, which means you get this feeling like your code always works the first or second try.

I found it overall a really fun language that gives me the "functional-lite" vibes of python without the typeless hell of python. There are some common paradigms that are a huge pain to do in rust, but overall I found the language engaging and the documentation is incredibly consistent and high quality so it really helps when learning.

I recently did a small IOT project on an ESP32 in rust, and it was a joy compared to dealing with json in C. I was able to write a simple protocol library, test it on my workstation, then use the same code without any changes and call it from the esp code. Rust literally made the project faster and easier. Especially due to the "it just werks" effect of the annoying compiler, far less weird runtime errors on an embedded device is just a delight.