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Ask HN: Is Learning Rust a Must?

31 points by technological 5y ago

Everywhere I read , I notice people talk about rust and how everything is being rewritten in rust. Is learning rust is must now ?

rvz 5y ago
> I notice people talk about rust and how everything is being rewritten in rust. Is learning rust is must now ? Like all other programming languages, only if you need it and if it fits your use-case. Otherwise a better language can be used instead. If it were me, the language I'd learn and use is the one that makes me the most money possible. At this stage for me, it is not Rust.
- truckerbill 5y ago
  What would your pick be?
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Some people say that COBOL is the highest-paid language. Maybe that's what they had in mind.
    - rvz 5y ago
      > Some people say that COBOL is the highest-paid language. Of the 20th century. I'm sure you know that we are in the 21st century.
twic 5y ago
No. Rust is a good language in many ways - generally well-designed, innovative, aimed at some under-served but important use-cases, very educational to learn, and surrounded by a lively community. But only a tiny fraction of the world's work and innovation is being done in Rust. There is a huge amount of interesting stuff happening in other languages. There is also much more work available in other languages - even interesting, well-paid work. Reasons to learn Rust right now: 1. You need to learn a low-level systems language, for use on a platform that Rust supports; i think Rust is a better bet for many uses than C++ already. 2. You have copious time to invest in learning, and ownership type systems are the most interesting or powerful thing you don't currently know. 3. There is some specific piece of software you want to get involved with, and it's written in Rust.
- adkadskhj 5y ago
  Disclaimer: Rust fanatic Sidenote, i think a lot of the tech crowd forgets how much industry will lag behind popularity, for a whole bunch of good reasons. My shop uses Rust, and all our hires are aimed at Rust, and it's still not easy - there's not a ton of people who know Rust. We would have a ton of candidates in Python, JavaScript(Node), even Go. Hell even PHP. The fact is that applicants tend to follow jobs, so you get a chicken-egg problem. New languages have a huge hill to climb in adoption and it takes years for companies to build up large codebases in new languages to result in a large job pool. Take any previously popular, old and uninteresting language and know it well - and you can get jobs for years and years and years to come. There's just a ton of code out there written in it that needs support, extension, etc. I always recommend learning Rust but it is certainly not a must.
  - duped 5y ago
    If you're hiring for specific language experience you're doing something wrong
    - jatins 5y ago
      Would be true for other languages which are more or less similar enough that knowing one is enough: Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python et al. But for Rust, looking for language experience might be the right choice since the learning curve is relatively steep and takes time. Unless, of course, the company is okay giving 2 months to just learn.
      - adkadskhj 5y ago
        > But for Rust, looking for language experience might be the right choice since the learning curve is relatively steep and takes time. Unless, of course, the company is okay giving 2 months to just learn. Yea, this is our opinion. Our options are limited due to the smaller talent pool, so the time it takes for devs to "spin up" is something we consider. We can't hire a full team of devs who take 2 months to spin up. We can, maybe, do 5 young devs and 5 seasoned devs. I've personally found that devs who have experience with C++ are almost a direct shoe-in. They know all the concepts and the transition seems easy, especially since they're already interested in Rust. Having hired a few dynamic language folks though, they have a higher barrier to entry with Rust. A lot more concepts to learn.
tracedddd 5y ago
This is like asking if you have to learn German to find work. Obviously you should be able to find work in any major language, but it may increase your opportunities (if you want to work in Germany.)
Iv 5y ago
If you are in a field where everything is being rewritten in Rust, then it may be a good idea to spend some time on it. It is not the case of every field though. Basically, Rust seems like a good replacement for most C++ applications. It offers memory and thread safety guarantees with no or minimal overhead and a speed comparable to C++. I am currently working on two projects: one in python, one in Rust. I am a proficient C/C++ dev but I think I will ditch C++ in the near future. I am not sure it makes sense to replace C with Rust unless safety is required. I don't see rust replacing python. Rust is painful to write, it is longer than C++ and python is much more productive when you can afford the overhead.
PaulHoule 5y ago
If you like it. If you are interested in systems work you will need to know some C++ even if you don’t like it. What I really want is a theorem prover attached to a macro assembler, that might scratch the rust itch better than rust.
- throwaway17_17 5y ago
  This comment is completely off the main topic, however, you are the first person I have encountered reading HN that is looking for a macro-assembler and theorem prover combo. I built a language to use just for my day to day and keep tinkering with it when I feel like it. One of the modes of operation is at least on the path to what you asked for. Right now, it is more of a generating C or C++ with full spectrum dependent types (i.e. it misses the convenience of the standard theorem provers). I find that it is quite practical for what I use it for, which is usually not at the full dependent type level, but it certainly works for me. I have toyed with making what would effectively be an assembly back end, but compiling to C++ usually fits my requirements. No real point in this comment, just wanted to cheer for another dev who seems to find interest in similar subjects.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jimsimmons 5y ago
  I’ve been exploring a similar space. Mind expanding on why you think the combo sticks?
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It is a long story, feel free to send me an email, but I'll summarize. I think it "sticks" technically but find it hard to see how it works as a business. I spent a lot of time working in the semantic web space heading in the direction of "low/no code" and was struck at how logic-basic programming (not just constraint languages but production rules and other approaches) has been dead in the water since the 1980s despite the tools getting much better and numerous but isolated success stories. Lately I got into the Arduino hobby and I've developed a number of things that are basically "traverse an object graph in program memory with several cursors" while doing a few streams of I/O. (Imagine I have a SPI lightstrip on my car and program memory has a set of dingbats, color palettes, a picture of a McLaren F1 and instructions to put it all together. For now I tell the driver to use the cruise control, someday it reads from maybe the CAN bus, GPS and accelerometer and runs a Kalman filter to stick the GFX to the ground) In a program like that the functions divide neatly into several layers and everything can be statically allocated and the more I think about it, the more I think the way C thinks about functions (return values, calling conventions, etc.) is not a good fit for the problem. I have no need for the stack, can allocate a few registers for the interrupt handlers, etc. Thus I think "C sucks" and I am no fan of gas (designed by somebody who hates assembly language but doesn't see the C-thulhu in old-school C compilers.) There are lots of papers where people apply theorem proving to assembly and seem to have an easier time than they do with languages like C. Maybe the behavior of the system is better defined, maybe you get into combinatorical problems with automatic allocation, etc. My C programs statically allocate as much as possible and have notes that say what color the functions are and informally justify that the thing works. I feel like a dork knowing how much wasted activity the C code is doing behind my back and think about re-writing it in AVR-8 assembly with even more detailed notes... ... so if those "notes" were a machine-readable proof that the memory allocation and other things in the program were correct and otherwise the system could SMT solve for things I don't want to code by hand that would be sweet. (A positive in this application is that the program is going to be small but the compiler is going to run on a much bigger machine.) As a business though I don't believe it. Even a Pascal-like or FORTRAN-like language without any real technical innovation is a bad enough sell for this market; Arduino using C is good for "education" because learning some C is useful, even if it teaches bad habits like BASIC. Portability is a problem too. I think AVR-8 is beautiful but it is a dead end but when the going gets tough I am going to swap in an RP2040 and add some transistors to shift levels. On top of that, expecting people to learn multiple new technologies is a big ask. I am sure many people think "C sucks" but jumping to the system I envision means learning assembly language, theorem proving, and a few other things. I could write many C programs in the time it would take to get that system up to the point where I could use it, and the investment would be several times that before other people could use it.
claudiug 5y ago
no.
jguzmanjr 5y ago
I would say it depends. Rust aims to solve perennial issues in software development by bringing as many issues “forward” in the development cycle. The way I think about the tradeoffs personally is that Rust is more "durable" than other languages. Its more rigorous type system and compile-time checks pushes more of your failure case discovery early into the development cycle while you're still getting it to compile, as opposed to runtime testing and debugging. There's less followup patching and bugs to discover because Rust usually makes you handle them up-front - particularly if you embrace the type system.
kyawzazaw 5y ago
That's because you are on HN.
UK-Al05 5y ago
No, it's competition for C and c++. Lots of programmers don't know C.
- adkadskhj 5y ago
  Fwiw it can compete in a lot of areas to a lot of languages. It doesn't represent a need to replace, say NodeJS or Python with Rust, because those languages don't typically have safety issues. However Rust offers low-level benefits with many high-level abstractions. It has lower level features, like generics, so the toolbag is definitely big - but that doesn't mean you always have to use the huge toolbag. I switched from Go because i wanted more language features. Rust isn't a competitor to Go imo, but indirectly it was for me. I never use C, and while i could use C++, i ultimately wanted a good dev UX. I chose Rust for my developer experience, not because it was a "better C/C++", of which i don't need.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I've heard this opinion a lot, so I'm curious about it. What makes you prefer Rust to Go? (edit: It's not just about Rust vs Go but Rust vs everything else, mostly GC'd languages when you can afford the performance hit). My intuition would be the type system, as Rust is currently the most popular ML-derivative. The compiler and rust-analyzer are also very nice to use.
    - adkadskhj 5y ago
      For me it was things that aided user(dev) experience, and that was primarily things like iterators, enums, and functional patterns like maps (in the robust stdlib), good crate ecosystem. That made a huge DX improvement for me because it was just so applicable in so many scenarios. And to top it all off, i got the DX of things like Iterators with usually zero usability hit - Iterators themselves are fairly complex, at least in the generic param context, but Rust encapsulates that complexity so well that you rarely see it. You just Iterate and gloss over the fact that it's actually really complex.
      - 5y ago
pops8 5y ago
Doesnt matter what you pick in an ever changing unpredictable world overflowing with software. All that matters is how many hours you put in and how close you are to areas where there is a high density of software development going on.
mastrsushi 5y ago
Far from everything is being rewritten in Rust. It definitely shows up on HN quite a bit, along with other places. But I think that’s just growing traction. It seems to have a bright future, but for the time being isn’t established enough to be worth learning for sake of industry relevance. If you simply like Rust, go ahead and invest time into learning it. There are companies looking for developers. It’s just not “the standard” at the time being.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jollybean 5y ago
We probably read very little about Java and yet it runs the world. What we like to read and write about may not be very well correlated with reality. Rust is a very niche language, gaining attention, and a serious contender to be an important language but it's probably not going to take over any space and even if it does, it's going to take a long while. You definitely don't need to learn Rust. It's a neat language though and it's worth tooling around in for a bit, at very least to get a feel for the 'borrow checker'.
cjbprime 5y ago
No, this is an echo chamber thing. The commercial software industry has largely not even heard of Rust. (Arguably they should!) The number of jobs available to purely write Rust code in the world is still very very small.
0des 5y ago
There will always be a popular language, if your goal is to get eyes on your stuff and get on the front page of HN, sure, write it in rust. If it were two years ago, I'd say write it in Go. If it were 5 years before that, I'd say NodeJS.
- jguzmanjr 5y ago
  Please keep in mind that there is more to software dev than web programming. Rust may not be popular as as server language now and never may be, but there are multitudes of other reasons why one should consider learning Rust.
sumanthvepa 5y ago
I'll take a contrarian view. C++ which Rust proponents usually target for replacement, is an extremely well tested language. In any real commercial application where a system programming language is needed, C++ would usually be a better choice if you know the language. If don't know C++, learn Rust, it's probably easier, and you'll make progress faster. But Modern C++ is extraordinarily powerful -- it may be worth learning to build some high performance systems like games and browsers.
- scrubs 5y ago
  This is good advise. Our large shop has so much C++ nobody here is gonna run and hide from it. Our libs are large, in large numbers. So not having C++ is a disadvantage. And for those same reasons we know building C++ is giant pain in the butt. Given the opportunity, I would seriously consider Rust when rearchitecting a system to peel off small bits I can do 100% RUST because I then can escape C++ dependency/cmake/DPKG/RPM hell to something closer to GO. When I deal with old C++ code not brought up to current build spec at our place I can waste 30-40% of my time getting various things to build. Getting the old code into the new system is now easier, but I killed a week learning it. And should I have to deal with a library off the beaten path who's dependencies I don't know, getting it into the new build system will be a pain-plus because I will then have to find/compute/assess its dependencies. Getting out from all this nonsense is, I think, is an undersold part of RUST. You still get static types, C++ performance, memory safety, and you get a running start to CDCI because at least getting the darn PR built is a 4 to 6 Phd job of hand holding C++ through dep management.
  - sumanthvepa 5y ago
    One thing I think I missed, was how pleasant it it is to program in modern C++. There are no pointers, for the most part completely automatic memory management (with the RAAI) idiom. Build systems are still a pain. I recently built a physics simulator for an n-body type interaction problem in C++. Not a a large program (about 40K lines of code) but the experience was extremely pleasant. For build I used a combination of make for Linux and macOS and nmake and VisualStudio projects. Debuggers on Linux are still a bit bad. GDB with Emacs is fine but, is somewhat primitive compared to VisualStudio and even Xcode. Other than that it was a joy to actually write in C++. The primary reason, I think was because there was no legacy code I had to deal with.
Xophmeister 5y ago
No, but why the reluctance? Not that you must learn it, but being open to learning new things as an engineer (or just about anyone) is generally positive.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  Not OP but Rust is a skill I’d like to prioritize if I were more confident in being allowed to use it professionally. It seems most employers feel (maybe rightly) they’re better off using Blub languages and renting more hardware. It’s not enough to find one Rust shop, I need to expect the next shop also to value the time I invested.
gadmm 5y ago
We taught Rust at Masters-level as part of a course meant to show engineering students a variety of concepts from innovative programming language (there was also Haskell and Scala). Learning Rust is a must (at least for our kind of students), but not because "everything is being rewritten in Rust". First, I think knowing concepts from various languages makes better programmers. But Rust in particular is part of a family of languages along with C++ that are very powerful and versatile, but that require a strong discipline in order to write correct programs. And while C++ is more widespread currently, learning Rust teaches you this discipline, simply because the compiler will keep rejecting your programs until you understand it. C++ compilers on the other hand happily accept nonsensical programs, and it is hard to find modern C++ experts to teach this skill (and sometimes it is even hard to get experts agree on what the discipline is!). Yet in some areas where C++ has few alternatives, unreliable software can have huge consequences. So learning Rust is important because it will also make of you a better C++ programmer.
spacechild1 5y ago
I think you spend too much time on HN :-)

31 points by technological 5y ago

Everywhere I read , I notice people talk about rust and how everything is being rewritten in rust. Is learning rust is must now ?

rvz 5y ago

> I notice people talk about rust and how everything is being rewritten in rust. Is learning rust is must now ? Like all other programming languages, only if you need it and if it fits your use-case. Otherwise a better language can be used instead. If it were me, the language I'd learn and use is the one that makes me the most money possible. At this stage for me, it is not Rust.

truckerbill 5y ago
What would your pick be?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Some people say that COBOL is the highest-paid language. Maybe that's what they had in mind.
  - rvz 5y ago
    > Some people say that COBOL is the highest-paid language. Of the 20th century. I'm sure you know that we are in the 21st century.

twic 5y ago

No. Rust is a good language in many ways - generally well-designed, innovative, aimed at some under-served but important use-cases, very educational to learn, and surrounded by a lively community. But only a tiny fraction of the world's work and innovation is being done in Rust. There is a huge amount of interesting stuff happening in other languages. There is also much more work available in other languages - even interesting, well-paid work. Reasons to learn Rust right now: 1. You need to learn a low-level systems language, for use on a platform that Rust supports; i think Rust is a better bet for many uses than C++ already. 2. You have copious time to invest in learning, and ownership type systems are the most interesting or powerful thing you don't currently know. 3. There is some specific piece of software you want to get involved with, and it's written in Rust.

adkadskhj 5y ago
Disclaimer: Rust fanatic Sidenote, i think a lot of the tech crowd forgets how much industry will lag behind popularity, for a whole bunch of good reasons. My shop uses Rust, and all our hires are aimed at Rust, and it's still not easy - there's not a ton of people who know Rust. We would have a ton of candidates in Python, JavaScript(Node), even Go. Hell even PHP. The fact is that applicants tend to follow jobs, so you get a chicken-egg problem. New languages have a huge hill to climb in adoption and it takes years for companies to build up large codebases in new languages to result in a large job pool. Take any previously popular, old and uninteresting language and know it well - and you can get jobs for years and years and years to come. There's just a ton of code out there written in it that needs support, extension, etc. I always recommend learning Rust but it is certainly not a must.
- duped 5y ago
  If you're hiring for specific language experience you're doing something wrong
  - jatins 5y ago
    Would be true for other languages which are more or less similar enough that knowing one is enough: Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python et al. But for Rust, looking for language experience might be the right choice since the learning curve is relatively steep and takes time. Unless, of course, the company is okay giving 2 months to just learn.
    - adkadskhj 5y ago
      > But for Rust, looking for language experience might be the right choice since the learning curve is relatively steep and takes time. Unless, of course, the company is okay giving 2 months to just learn. Yea, this is our opinion. Our options are limited due to the smaller talent pool, so the time it takes for devs to "spin up" is something we consider. We can't hire a full team of devs who take 2 months to spin up. We can, maybe, do 5 young devs and 5 seasoned devs. I've personally found that devs who have experience with C++ are almost a direct shoe-in. They know all the concepts and the transition seems easy, especially since they're already interested in Rust. Having hired a few dynamic language folks though, they have a higher barrier to entry with Rust. A lot more concepts to learn.

tracedddd 5y ago

This is like asking if you have to learn German to find work. Obviously you should be able to find work in any major language, but it may increase your opportunities (if you want to work in Germany.)

Iv 5y ago

If you are in a field where everything is being rewritten in Rust, then it may be a good idea to spend some time on it. It is not the case of every field though. Basically, Rust seems like a good replacement for most C++ applications. It offers memory and thread safety guarantees with no or minimal overhead and a speed comparable to C++. I am currently working on two projects: one in python, one in Rust. I am a proficient C/C++ dev but I think I will ditch C++ in the near future. I am not sure it makes sense to replace C with Rust unless safety is required. I don't see rust replacing python. Rust is painful to write, it is longer than C++ and python is much more productive when you can afford the overhead.

PaulHoule 5y ago

If you like it. If you are interested in systems work you will need to know some C++ even if you don’t like it. What I really want is a theorem prover attached to a macro assembler, that might scratch the rust itch better than rust.

throwaway17_17 5y ago
This comment is completely off the main topic, however, you are the first person I have encountered reading HN that is looking for a macro-assembler and theorem prover combo. I built a language to use just for my day to day and keep tinkering with it when I feel like it. One of the modes of operation is at least on the path to what you asked for. Right now, it is more of a generating C or C++ with full spectrum dependent types (i.e. it misses the convenience of the standard theorem provers). I find that it is quite practical for what I use it for, which is usually not at the full dependent type level, but it certainly works for me. I have toyed with making what would effectively be an assembly back end, but compiling to C++ usually fits my requirements. No real point in this comment, just wanted to cheer for another dev who seems to find interest in similar subjects.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jimsimmons 5y ago
I’ve been exploring a similar space. Mind expanding on why you think the combo sticks?
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It is a long story, feel free to send me an email, but I'll summarize. I think it "sticks" technically but find it hard to see how it works as a business. I spent a lot of time working in the semantic web space heading in the direction of "low/no code" and was struck at how logic-basic programming (not just constraint languages but production rules and other approaches) has been dead in the water since the 1980s despite the tools getting much better and numerous but isolated success stories. Lately I got into the Arduino hobby and I've developed a number of things that are basically "traverse an object graph in program memory with several cursors" while doing a few streams of I/O. (Imagine I have a SPI lightstrip on my car and program memory has a set of dingbats, color palettes, a picture of a McLaren F1 and instructions to put it all together. For now I tell the driver to use the cruise control, someday it reads from maybe the CAN bus, GPS and accelerometer and runs a Kalman filter to stick the GFX to the ground) In a program like that the functions divide neatly into several layers and everything can be statically allocated and the more I think about it, the more I think the way C thinks about functions (return values, calling conventions, etc.) is not a good fit for the problem. I have no need for the stack, can allocate a few registers for the interrupt handlers, etc. Thus I think "C sucks" and I am no fan of gas (designed by somebody who hates assembly language but doesn't see the C-thulhu in old-school C compilers.) There are lots of papers where people apply theorem proving to assembly and seem to have an easier time than they do with languages like C. Maybe the behavior of the system is better defined, maybe you get into combinatorical problems with automatic allocation, etc. My C programs statically allocate as much as possible and have notes that say what color the functions are and informally justify that the thing works. I feel like a dork knowing how much wasted activity the C code is doing behind my back and think about re-writing it in AVR-8 assembly with even more detailed notes... ... so if those "notes" were a machine-readable proof that the memory allocation and other things in the program were correct and otherwise the system could SMT solve for things I don't want to code by hand that would be sweet. (A positive in this application is that the program is going to be small but the compiler is going to run on a much bigger machine.) As a business though I don't believe it. Even a Pascal-like or FORTRAN-like language without any real technical innovation is a bad enough sell for this market; Arduino using C is good for "education" because learning some C is useful, even if it teaches bad habits like BASIC. Portability is a problem too. I think AVR-8 is beautiful but it is a dead end but when the going gets tough I am going to swap in an RP2040 and add some transistors to shift levels. On top of that, expecting people to learn multiple new technologies is a big ask. I am sure many people think "C sucks" but jumping to the system I envision means learning assembly language, theorem proving, and a few other things. I could write many C programs in the time it would take to get that system up to the point where I could use it, and the investment would be several times that before other people could use it.

claudiug 5y ago

no.

jguzmanjr 5y ago

I would say it depends. Rust aims to solve perennial issues in software development by bringing as many issues “forward” in the development cycle. The way I think about the tradeoffs personally is that Rust is more "durable" than other languages. Its more rigorous type system and compile-time checks pushes more of your failure case discovery early into the development cycle while you're still getting it to compile, as opposed to runtime testing and debugging. There's less followup patching and bugs to discover because Rust usually makes you handle them up-front - particularly if you embrace the type system.

kyawzazaw 5y ago

That's because you are on HN.

UK-Al05 5y ago

No, it's competition for C and c++. Lots of programmers don't know C.

adkadskhj 5y ago
Fwiw it can compete in a lot of areas to a lot of languages. It doesn't represent a need to replace, say NodeJS or Python with Rust, because those languages don't typically have safety issues. However Rust offers low-level benefits with many high-level abstractions. It has lower level features, like generics, so the toolbag is definitely big - but that doesn't mean you always have to use the huge toolbag. I switched from Go because i wanted more language features. Rust isn't a competitor to Go imo, but indirectly it was for me. I never use C, and while i could use C++, i ultimately wanted a good dev UX. I chose Rust for my developer experience, not because it was a "better C/C++", of which i don't need.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I've heard this opinion a lot, so I'm curious about it. What makes you prefer Rust to Go? (edit: It's not just about Rust vs Go but Rust vs everything else, mostly GC'd languages when you can afford the performance hit). My intuition would be the type system, as Rust is currently the most popular ML-derivative. The compiler and rust-analyzer are also very nice to use.
  - adkadskhj 5y ago
    For me it was things that aided user(dev) experience, and that was primarily things like iterators, enums, and functional patterns like maps (in the robust stdlib), good crate ecosystem. That made a huge DX improvement for me because it was just so applicable in so many scenarios. And to top it all off, i got the DX of things like Iterators with usually zero usability hit - Iterators themselves are fairly complex, at least in the generic param context, but Rust encapsulates that complexity so well that you rarely see it. You just Iterate and gloss over the fact that it's actually really complex.
    - 5y ago

pops8 5y ago

Doesnt matter what you pick in an ever changing unpredictable world overflowing with software. All that matters is how many hours you put in and how close you are to areas where there is a high density of software development going on.

mastrsushi 5y ago

Far from everything is being rewritten in Rust. It definitely shows up on HN quite a bit, along with other places. But I think that’s just growing traction. It seems to have a bright future, but for the time being isn’t established enough to be worth learning for sake of industry relevance. If you simply like Rust, go ahead and invest time into learning it. There are companies looking for developers. It’s just not “the standard” at the time being.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jollybean 5y ago

We probably read very little about Java and yet it runs the world. What we like to read and write about may not be very well correlated with reality. Rust is a very niche language, gaining attention, and a serious contender to be an important language but it's probably not going to take over any space and even if it does, it's going to take a long while. You definitely don't need to learn Rust. It's a neat language though and it's worth tooling around in for a bit, at very least to get a feel for the 'borrow checker'.

cjbprime 5y ago

No, this is an echo chamber thing. The commercial software industry has largely not even heard of Rust. (Arguably they should!) The number of jobs available to purely write Rust code in the world is still very very small.

0des 5y ago

There will always be a popular language, if your goal is to get eyes on your stuff and get on the front page of HN, sure, write it in rust. If it were two years ago, I'd say write it in Go. If it were 5 years before that, I'd say NodeJS.

jguzmanjr 5y ago
Please keep in mind that there is more to software dev than web programming. Rust may not be popular as as server language now and never may be, but there are multitudes of other reasons why one should consider learning Rust.

sumanthvepa 5y ago

I'll take a contrarian view. C++ which Rust proponents usually target for replacement, is an extremely well tested language. In any real commercial application where a system programming language is needed, C++ would usually be a better choice if you know the language. If don't know C++, learn Rust, it's probably easier, and you'll make progress faster. But Modern C++ is extraordinarily powerful -- it may be worth learning to build some high performance systems like games and browsers.

scrubs 5y ago
This is good advise. Our large shop has so much C++ nobody here is gonna run and hide from it. Our libs are large, in large numbers. So not having C++ is a disadvantage. And for those same reasons we know building C++ is giant pain in the butt. Given the opportunity, I would seriously consider Rust when rearchitecting a system to peel off small bits I can do 100% RUST because I then can escape C++ dependency/cmake/DPKG/RPM hell to something closer to GO. When I deal with old C++ code not brought up to current build spec at our place I can waste 30-40% of my time getting various things to build. Getting the old code into the new system is now easier, but I killed a week learning it. And should I have to deal with a library off the beaten path who's dependencies I don't know, getting it into the new build system will be a pain-plus because I will then have to find/compute/assess its dependencies. Getting out from all this nonsense is, I think, is an undersold part of RUST. You still get static types, C++ performance, memory safety, and you get a running start to CDCI because at least getting the darn PR built is a 4 to 6 Phd job of hand holding C++ through dep management.
- sumanthvepa 5y ago
  One thing I think I missed, was how pleasant it it is to program in modern C++. There are no pointers, for the most part completely automatic memory management (with the RAAI) idiom. Build systems are still a pain. I recently built a physics simulator for an n-body type interaction problem in C++. Not a a large program (about 40K lines of code) but the experience was extremely pleasant. For build I used a combination of make for Linux and macOS and nmake and VisualStudio projects. Debuggers on Linux are still a bit bad. GDB with Emacs is fine but, is somewhat primitive compared to VisualStudio and even Xcode. Other than that it was a joy to actually write in C++. The primary reason, I think was because there was no legacy code I had to deal with.

Xophmeister 5y ago

No, but why the reluctance? Not that you must learn it, but being open to learning new things as an engineer (or just about anyone) is generally positive.

erik_seaberg 5y ago
Not OP but Rust is a skill I’d like to prioritize if I were more confident in being allowed to use it professionally. It seems most employers feel (maybe rightly) they’re better off using Blub languages and renting more hardware. It’s not enough to find one Rust shop, I need to expect the next shop also to value the time I invested.

gadmm 5y ago

We taught Rust at Masters-level as part of a course meant to show engineering students a variety of concepts from innovative programming language (there was also Haskell and Scala). Learning Rust is a must (at least for our kind of students), but not because "everything is being rewritten in Rust". First, I think knowing concepts from various languages makes better programmers. But Rust in particular is part of a family of languages along with C++ that are very powerful and versatile, but that require a strong discipline in order to write correct programs. And while C++ is more widespread currently, learning Rust teaches you this discipline, simply because the compiler will keep rejecting your programs until you understand it. C++ compilers on the other hand happily accept nonsensical programs, and it is hard to find modern C++ experts to teach this skill (and sometimes it is even hard to get experts agree on what the discipline is!). Yet in some areas where C++ has few alternatives, unreliable software can have huge consequences. So learning Rust is important because it will also make of you a better C++ programmer.

spacechild1 5y ago

I think you spend too much time on HN :-)