I am not hating on Rust. I am honestly looking for reasons why I should learn and use Rust. Currently, I am a Go developer. I haven’t touched any other language for years, except JavaScript for occasional front end work and other languages for OSS contributions.
After working with almost every mainstream language over the years and flitting between them on a whim, I have fallen in love with Go. It feels like ‘home’ to me - it’s comfortable and I enjoy working with it and I have little motivation to use anything else. I rage every time I get stuck working with JavaScript because dependency management is pure hell when dealing with the intersection of packages and browsers - by contrast, dependency management is a breeze with Go modules. I’ll grant that it can suck when using private packages, but I everything I work on is open.
Rust is intriguing. Controlling the lifecycle of variables in detail appeals to me. I don’t mind garbage collectors but Rust’s approach seems far more elegant. The main issue for me is the syntax, specifically generic types, traits, and lifetimes. It looks just about as bad as C++'s template system, minus the latter’s awful compiler errors. After working almost exclusively with Go for years, reading it seems unnecessarily demanding. And IMO the only thing more important than readability is whether it works.
Why should I learn and use rust?
P.S.: I don’t care about political stuff like “Because Google sucks”. I see no evidence that Google is controlling the project. And I’m not interested in “Because Go sucks” opinions - it should be obvious that I disagree.
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Ironically, I learned Rust first, and later looked at Go. I found a lot of the syntax needlessly “different”. That being said, it’s still a decent language. Point being, a lot of the weirdness subsides once you understand why it’s there.
Personally, I don’t actually care about the lifecycle and memory management stuff. What I like about Rust is:
- An enforced error type that is very convenient to use with the ? operator. No more err != nil spam, but same amount of safety
- ADTs with a host of wonderful features, like exhaustive match statements. Go enums are horrendously basic, let’s be honest
- NO NIL!! Non existence is expressed with an Option type that, like the error type, comes with many conveniences
- Generics from the start, meaning you don’t have older code that throws away type safety anywhere
- Traits/Interfaces can be implemented for foreign/external types and types can implement external interfaces (duh)
- Great tooling, good formatting tools, good LSP, that kind of stuff. Golang has that too
Why learn Rust? For the same reason everyone should learn different languages. To learn new concepts and see new perspectives on old problems. It’ll make you a better developer even in your previous languages.
You should learn Rust because you think that the language is intriguing and that controlling the lifespan of a variable is an interesting feature.
There are no reasons to learn it apart from getting familiar with some of the concepts in it or working on a rust project.
