This was a really good summary of what Rust feels like in my opinion. I’m still a beginner myself but I recognize what this article is saying very much.

The hacker news comments are as usual very good too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033

  • @farcaster
    7•8 months ago

    It is a general purpose language for me. I wrote lots of little (or not so little) scripts in Rust. I wrote high performance GPU kernels in Rust. I wrote web services in Rust. It’s less hard to read and write Rust than is often claimed. Imo.

    • @[email protected]
      2•8 months ago

      You can, of course. And if you’re good enough at it, and focus on keeping it simple, you can keep the complexity down to a minimum, at least with most straightforward programs.

      Buut you can say the same about other complicated languages like c++. And things like writing quick “shell script” type things are going to be pretty simple in almost every decent language. Even if the result is slightly more verbose it won’t really matter.

      • @farcaster
        5•8 months ago

        For me the biggest difference between Rust and C++, for things like scripting, is cargo. Being able to just add an awesome parser, or support for a particular file-format, to my “script” with a single line in cargo.toml is awesome. In this particular way cargo is better than Python even. The amount of time spent on acquiring, setting up, and linking libraries in other languages cannot be understated.

        • @[email protected]
          3•8 months ago

          yeah rust along other new languages takes package management (and some other “hard learned lessons”) seriously, which gives it an advantage over most older languages (and it’s ahead other newer languages in that there is a serious amount of adoption for rust… a package manager that has no packages to manage is not very useful)