> For someone new to systems programming, should I just start with Rust? Or should I learn C/C++ first and then learn Rust? IMHO, if your end-goal is Rust, lea

> For someone new to systems programming, should I just start with Rust? Or should I learn C/C++ first and then learn Rust? IMHO, if your end-goal is Rust, learn Rust directly. The angle I am coming from: I've been doing C++ for 20 years and Rust for over a year. Learning C/C++ can provide great value on its own, through gaining knowledge of how lower-level programming primitives work, but many of your C/C++ skills won't be subsequently applicable to Rust, except perhaps for core concepts such as a stack, a heap, owning memory, a `struct`, etc. This is caused by the fact that Rust takes many programming abstractions much _farther_ than C and in a substantially _different_ direction than C++. For example: where C uses manually managed pointers, Rust uses compile-time checked ownership and borrowing; where C++ uses inheritance, Rust uses generics and composition; where C uses void pointers ;) and C++ uses pure virtual functions, Rust uses traits and `where` clauses; where C and C++ use... a programmer's eyeballs to guarantee multi-threaded correctness ;), Rust uses compile-time "marker" traits; and so on. Don't get me wrong: C and C++ are extremely able, powerhouse languages worth your time in their own respect, it is just that most of the C/C++ -specific knowledge you invest your time to learn beforehand won't be directly applicable to Rust later on, because Rust just does things in a significantly different way than C/C++. Oh, don't forget to RTFM - Rust is easy to learn by reading (in order to understand its unique concepts), but Rust is hard to learn by experimentation alone (trying 100 different syntax variations to see what compiles).