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This is highly personal and depends on your learning style. I always want to learn bottom up, and personally recommend starting with C. A) Rust gives you ma

This is highly personal and depends on your learning style. I always want to learn bottom up, and personally recommend starting with C. A) Rust gives you many great abstractions that you will want to use, even if you skip the standard library. This gets in the way of really learning to work with and understanding pointers and low level mechanisms. You can certainly do that in Rust, but you have to force yourself to ignore most oft the language. B) You will have to read and interact with C code eventually, and be it just calling out to libraries or wrapping libraries in Rust interfaces. A solid understanding of C is critical to do that correctly. There's also a lot of safety tooling that you rarely need with Rust, but should be comfortable with. (Like valgrind) After learning Rust you will hate working with C (well, I do...), so it's better to do it early.

tialaramex 4y ago
I essentially began with C, but my guess is that you should start lower if you can. You don't want to get fooled into thinking C's abstract machine is what your actual machine is like, because it really, really isn't. A bunch of the stuff C is deliberately vague about because it wasn't portable in the 1970s is very concrete and important to understand about on a real computer. Rust's Wrapping<u8> and Saturating<i16> have behaviour that you could buy with a real CPU (indeed your actual CPU almost certainly can do Wrapping<u8> with no extra work) but C doesn't promise anything like this and names types things like "short int" which could be anything. On the other hand, some things C makes seem obviously concretely real, are just being simulated convincingly and that's not necessarily how your CPU works at all. Nobody really promised "pointers" are just integers you can go around doing arithmetic with for example.

tialaramex 4y ago

I essentially began with C, but my guess is that you should start lower if you can. You don't want to get fooled into thinking C's abstract machine is what your actual machine is like, because it really, really isn't. A bunch of the stuff C is deliberately vague about because it wasn't portable in the 1970s is very concrete and important to understand about on a real computer. Rust's Wrapping<u8> and Saturating<i16> have behaviour that you could buy with a real CPU (indeed your actual CPU almost certainly can do Wrapping<u8> with no extra work) but C doesn't promise anything like this and names types things like "short int" which could be anything. On the other hand, some things C makes seem obviously concretely real, are just being simulated convincingly and that's not necessarily how your CPU works at all. Nobody really promised "pointers" are just integers you can go around doing arithmetic with for example.