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I started learning some Rust, just begging of this yeae, and I am starting to think learning C might be the shortest path to fully understand the motivation of

by warabe 4y ago

I started learning some Rust, just begging of this yeae, and I am starting to think learning C might be the shortest path to fully understand the motivation of ownership model. But at the same time, I don't want to invest so much time into learning a language which I probably am not going to use. I am probably being disrespectful. I understand a lot of people use C, including Linux kernel devs, but I cannot imagine developing new apps with an old language such as C.

voidhorse 4y ago
Not wanting to invest time makes sense, but I think you'll definitely get return on investment by learning C. It's doesn't end with rust. Learning C's approach to memory will give you a much better understanding of pretty much all object oriented and imperative languages and give you a better understanding about how memory might be used under the hood in higher level languages in general. It won't take you too long either! Compared to modern languages, C is very small and very simple and likely won't take as long as learning any other popular language in use today. You can learn all of C in the amount of time it takes most people to learn just the basics of a borrow checker. If you only focus on the aspects related to memory (stack, heap, sizing, arrays, pointers) it would likely only take half a day, if that.
- warabe 4y ago
  Yeah, haste makes waste. I will give it a shot! Thanks for the tips!
lozenge 4y ago
Are you not interested in contributing to existing projects like Postgres, CPython... or being able to use the many libraries with C APIs?
- warabe 4y ago
  Well, that sounds exciting, but I am a novice programmer from data science field. So, I am more like a user, rather than a developer. Contributing to world class projects such as Postgres sounds cool, but doesn't it take years of experience? Of course there are other benefit of learning C as you noted.

by warabe 4y ago

voidhorse 4y ago

Not wanting to invest time makes sense, but I think you'll definitely get return on investment by learning C. It's doesn't end with rust. Learning C's approach to memory will give you a much better understanding of pretty much all object oriented and imperative languages and give you a better understanding about how memory might be used under the hood in higher level languages in general. It won't take you too long either! Compared to modern languages, C is very small and very simple and likely won't take as long as learning any other popular language in use today. You can learn all of C in the amount of time it takes most people to learn just the basics of a borrow checker. If you only focus on the aspects related to memory (stack, heap, sizing, arrays, pointers) it would likely only take half a day, if that.

warabe 4y ago
Yeah, haste makes waste. I will give it a shot! Thanks for the tips!

lozenge 4y ago

Are you not interested in contributing to existing projects like Postgres, CPython... or being able to use the many libraries with C APIs?

warabe 4y ago
Well, that sounds exciting, but I am a novice programmer from data science field. So, I am more like a user, rather than a developer. Contributing to world class projects such as Postgres sounds cool, but doesn't it take years of experience? Of course there are other benefit of learning C as you noted.