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.
You should learn Rust because you think that the language is intriguing and that controlling the lifespan of a variable is an interesting feature.
Not even “controlling the lifespan” but, “being whipped by your machine when you are not careful with the lifetimes.”
I’ve used Rust professionally for five years now, and it is too hard to give a full answer in any single comment. There are so many reasons. You are right, it is a lot more elegant. You can do things with its type system which you can’t in any other mainstream language, because of ownership. It’s really a life changing experience, so I’d suggest you just try it out, build a project in it, and see what it’s like. You won’t regret it.
I strongly disagree about generics / syntax. IMO they’re fine and you’ll learn to love them.
The high level answer I’ll give is that Rust is a language that is designed from the ground up to not make many sacrifices. You can use it for systems programming where you can’t use a garbage collector, or for high level stuff like an API server. It feels high level while also being as low level as you need it to. Its errors are absolutely fantastic. Same with the tooling and package manager.
You should really just see for yourself.
I strongly disagree about generics / syntax. IMO they’re fine and you’ll learn to love them.
True! Rust’s design is very orthogonal. The generics, lifetimes and other similar features work very well together.
The main issue for me is the syntax, specifically generic types, traits, and lifetimes.
After working almost exclusively with Go for years, reading it seems unnecessarily demanding.
Like someone else said, this is a complex subject to answer. The syntax looks perplexing and frustrating, until it doesn’t. These days, Rust syntax is nowhere in my thought while coding - it like when you drive, you are thinking about where you want to go rather than about manipulating the controls.
Why should I learn and use rust?
Rust’'s rules are about enforcing memory safety. But it also ends up forcing you to write better programs than what you imagined you could. It’s hard to describe that feeling - you have to experience it. That alone is a good reason to learn it - even if you end up not using it in the future.
Rust’s unique design also leads to many design patterns not normally seen in most other languages. That’s also worth exploring.
I have fallen in love with Go. It feels like ‘home’ to me
That’s a perfectly good thing. It’s hard to find that sweet spot. However, don’t let that stop you from exploring the alternatives. You might find ideas you could use in Go.
Rust’s unique design also leads to many design patterns not normally seen in most other languages.
I’ve heard quite a few people talk about how good they realised Options were, and that they now try to use that same pattern in other languages like Python. It really does teach you new tricks!
I don’t know how useful Options are in Python, with its duck typing. Python had something similar to
Option::Noneall along -None. It’s possible to use None in Python is very idiomatic and surprising ways. Rust’sSomeandNoneare tagged unions. And Rust forces you to address them - unlike Python.Well, with the newer optional typing, it became
def foo(name: Optional[str]) -> Optional[str]: ...and nowdef foo(name: str | None) -> str | None: ...(No need to import Optional) It’s quite nice.As for Rust, recall that Result is also a very similar union type. I think a lot of the aversions people have had to static typing have mostly just been about poor expressiveness in clunky type systems.
I have been programming in Python for nearly two decades now. This is the first I’m hearing about the
Optionalimprovements to Python’s type hints/annotations. Thanks a lot for this. I’m going to take a re-look into type hints.As for Rust, recall that Result is also a very similar union type.
I’m aware that Rust enums, including Result, are tagged unions. However, my understanding is that it’s not like that in Python. Python’s duck typing is enabled by typing the values, rather than the variables. A variable can point to a value of any type. Am I getting this wrong? Or is
Optionaldifferent somehow?
Go is a great language. I used it a few times when dealing with bugs in open source programs. And though I never used it besides that, I could spot and fix these easy issues fast.
Rust is not like that. The syntax is a little harder to read and a lot of widely used libraries use complex macros to ease their users lives.
But:
I cannot count the times rust has saved my ass.Examples:
Sqlx checks my sql files against a local test-db and always errors, when my scripts miss parameters after changing the sql file.
I have to use a complicated mess of an API at work to get the data I need and I now use a 50-60 element enum that tells me exactly, what I got back from the API-calls.When I write code, it’s typically in Go or Python.
The reason I’m curious to learn Rust is specifically to contribute to existing projects that are written in Rust.
If you’re interested in working on Lemmy code, for example, you’ve gotta learn some Rust to do it.
In purely practical terms, Rust gives more precise resource control (deterministic memory management instead of garbage collection). In language geek terms, Rust has a more precise type system that lets you capture and enforce program invariants at compile time, in ways that Go doesn’t. That makes refactoring more reliable among other things. Is it worth it? That’s a variant of the age old debate between static and dynamic type systems.
I would say language theory is an important branch of CS, that anyone trying to be a strong programmer should know something about, just like they should know how the quicksort algorithm works or that the halting problem is undecidable. If Rust isn’t to your fancy, you might try Haskell, which has a similar (maybe even fancier) type system, but is garbage collected and has a different execution model. Try learnyouahaskell.com for a good tutorial.
Disclosure: I use Haskell but for now haven’t yet used Rust. Rust is interesting, I just haven’t gotten to it yet. I do like Ada.
Every language is just a tool for the job. From what I understand Go is great for multithreaded web or backend applications. Now if you were a game developer you would most likely not be using Go as it is not industry standard and the support just isn’t there. Rust also intrigued me but as my current job is windows only I mostly write code in C# or Powershell.
What I do like about Rust are things like exhaustive matching and memory safety. I dislike cargo for the same reason I don’t like other languages with package management, supply chain security risks.
Pick the best tool for the job and use whatever language you enjoy the most.
idk if youve heard but its memory safe
I’d have to be living under a particularly large rock to be unaware of that. “It’s memory safe” isn’t that big of a deal to me. Even building concurrent systems, memory safety has never been a significant issue for me with Go.
i think go is also considered memory safe due to the garbage collector
Go is memory safe due to its garbage collection. Which adds a decent overhead generally.
Rusts memory safety is enforced at compile time and therefore has zero cost at runtime.
For a system level language this can be really important.
In my book, “memory safety” also means avoiding data races. AFAIK Rust prevents most or all races by enforcing ownership and lifetime of pointers.
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.
There are no reasons to learn it apart from getting familiar with some of the concepts in it or working on a rust project.
