For the fifth year in a row, Rust comes out as the most-loved programming language according to Stack Overflow's 2020 Survey.
Have you tried it yet? If so, what are your first impressions?
If you haven't, what's the reason, or what would make you want to try it?
Would love to hear your thoughts 😃
Top comments (6)
I have, and I love it. The learning curve is massive, but I enjoyed every step of it. I've built a handful of things in Rust to replace existing things that I used or built in other languages and am slowly building up experience and familiarity with more complex aspects like Cows and async-await.
I asked Dan above, but want to ask you as well since you mentioned it. What would help ease the learning curve for you?
Not much, honestly. I fully agree with Dan's observations. Rust's choice to not hide the intricacies of platform differences behind wrong abstractions are certainly overwhelming when we start but I feel it's a very good thing, same like the concept of lifetimes which doesn't have a corollary in other languages I've worked with.
Yes, I have. I've been using it off and on since about 2015. I haven't used it professionally, but I really enjoy it. Coming from a Ruby background it feels nice to not have to add types to everything. It feels close to the metal, but also has well thought out abstractions and language constructs that make it easier to write clean code.
Like others have said, it has a learning curve, but once you get your bearings with the borrow checker it's easier to continue learning. I haven't dug into anything very complex like multi-threading or async though so who knows. Overall it's a very fun and approachable language for systems-level programming.
What do you think would help ease the learning curve?
I'm not sure there is. I think reading the Rust book helps a lot. Rust has complicated parts for a reason, so it helps if you understand those reasons before you start banging your head against a wall. For example, how Rust handles strings is complex because UTF characters aren't just fixed width bytes and it forces you deal with those complexities.