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When Not to Use Rust?
- mc4ndr3 5y agoA full appreciation of Rust entails functional declarative programing a la ML's with the embedded knowledge of C++. It's a great language but not for the faint of heart. The performance margins are slim compared to Go, whose learning curve is far more gently sloping. If your team is already using Rust, or a sufficiently wizened language like C or C++, then by all means enjoy the rewards that Rust offers. But a more productive path to success, save extreme specialized cases like real time programming or high frequency trading, is found through more accessible systems-like languages. To put it bluntly, teams are faceplanting with plain JavaScript. I don't expect many to dedicate the time to craft required to become proficient in a strongly typed language. I've had to leave two different jobs advertised as "Go" programming roles, because my tech leads actually banned Go. Citing "It's too hard." Well, if Go is "hard," JavaScript is not the rainbow they're after. What utter madness. But anyway, this provides perspective into the blinkered state of software development circa 2022. They've stopped hiring for "hard" languages, as a significant market share of programming jobs. That's not to say there aren't Clojure jobs or Erlang jobs or Rust jobs out there. But these are few and far between at present. I'm open to any programming language being one's first programming language, in order to learn the fundamentals of making a computer beep. This includes the daunting Rust language, and extends to catastrophic languages like Excel or Python as well. Whatever tool works for you in study, enjoy. For general productivity, I do worry that Rust may be a bridge too far for most developers. Maybe we just need more educational material. Prove me wrong.