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At Oxide, we do "web API layer" stuff in Rust. We also don't require that candidates be Rust experts, though obviously experience helps. Many of those people wh

At Oxide, we do "web API layer" stuff in Rust. We also don't require that candidates be Rust experts, though obviously experience helps. Many of those people who are "proficient in C#, JS, Java, Go, Python and the like" can absolutely write Rust, even if there is some slowness at first. You have to be willing to believe that and consider it when hiring, of course, which some organizations may reasonably not be willing to.

whitepoplar 4y ago
How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust? In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023?
- arch-ninja 4y ago
  6 months if you're a college-sophmore-level student doing it part-time (my own experience + numbers), I'd estimate 3-4 weeks if you were spending more than 3hrs/day on it and knew 2 other languages.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    That would be my estimate as well. I've seem some porting between Go and Rust (both ways) where either way an experienced developer with some multi-language knowledge got up and running in a day, writing useful code in a week and being proficient enough to do normal sprint work in about another week. It mostly depends on what you have in you brain, what you see when you look at code, and if you understand why you do what you do rather than repeating a trick and hoping it works, and I suppose that is a combination of theory and experience.
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  > How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust? I think it's exceedingly difficult to make such a broad generalization. There's a number of factors here at play, but for example, I think the struggles of a Rubyist learning Rust are very different than a C developer learning Rust, and are very different than someone who's proficient with both who is learning Rust. It's also hard because there's also just other random factors. There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. Sometimes it takes coming back two or three times. Do you count all of that dead time? Something in there helped, but it's unclear what, or why this affects some people. Another theme of stories I've heard is a sort of Golidlocks situation about how "right" you think the compiler is. Some folks have the attitude that the compiler is to be seen, not heard, and should stop nagging them about things. Those folks tend to really struggle with Rust, even if they have lots of relevant experience previously. Likewise, some folks trust the compiler so completely that they will lose a bunch of time when a compiler suggestion leads them down the wrong path. Luckily, that problem is easier to fix than the former one, and is rarer and rarer every day. But these sorts of attributes are completely separate than what we think of when we talk "competency" of devs. > In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023? This sounds tautological, but bear with me: it's whatever path gets you to learn Rust. That sounds trite but what I mean is that different people have different needs (see above) and so need different things. There is no one best way. For some people, the book works really, really well. For others, they either hate the writing style, or the pace, or just something ineffable. I wouldn't say that they're wrong for that, just that they'd be served by different strategies. What I will say is that "I know other languages, I can just kinda start coding and pick it up" tends to not work for almost anyone. You either need to be quick to ask questions from the community, or be willing to do some reading, or you may run into some struggles that will take you longer to overcome than if you were willing to get some help. Folks who take advantage of community resources, broadly speaking, tend to do better than folks that think they can write some code and learn solely through errors, as Rust's semantics are just unique enough that some background and explanation can be extremely helpful.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    > There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. This was my experience, I came back a year or two later, and both I and the language had improved. I'm not sure who improved more, but whatever happened I'm really enjoying the language now.
- eYrKEC2 4y ago
  My current employer has a web backend and CLI in Rust. I joined the company having only dabbled in Rust, but having a background in C++, python, javascript, and verilog. It took me a month to feel able to do things and 3 months to feel reasonably comfortable. Still haven't mastered it after 1.5 years. Certain pieces of the rust ecosystem have their own learning curve such as diesel orm.
  - DoesntMatter22 4y ago
    I was using Chat GPT to learn rust but most of the examples it generated were pretty old (mysql 4 vs now at 21).
    - joshka 4y ago
      As a fellow rust n00b, one of the big problems I'm seeing with using ChatGPT to generate rust is that it often doesn't have a good model of ownership semantics. This has caused me lots of burnt time working through plausible but not accurate solutions to problems.
      - andrewstuart 4y ago
        You’re saying AI has trouble learning Rust too?
        joshka 4y ago
        Lol. Yup. Though it’s possible that it was overfitting its response to my noob questions. I’ve had better luck since.
- joshka 4y ago
  The tokio tutorial is (mostly) pretty well written and worth a read. There's a lot of good docs like rust-by-example and the rust book, but for my liking, those both seem to spend too much time on each topics rather than distilling the info into smaller denser topics. This is probably great for newer developers but more difficult for someone that wants to learn the 30 second version of something rather than the 5 minute version. It's possible that punching these books through a GPT prompt like "Extract the salient points from the following:" might help?
makestuff 4y ago
Not sure if rust is significantly harder to learn than Go, but as a Java dev I was able to pickup go and make contributions in around a week or so. Yeah I was slower, but we had some really good Go devs who had all of the tooling and packages laid out with best practices. This made it easy for new devs to jump into it. I think the issue happens when you have a new rust/go/javascript/etc. dev trying to setup a project for the first time.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  Yes Rust is significantly harder than go. It's diametrically opposite if there was a circle of complexity. I honestly have no clue how someone without low level experience (eg. never did systems level programming) even approaches Rust. The ownership model makes sense to me but if I had to grok manual memory management and rust abstractions on top of it at the same time I think I would be unable to contribute even trivial stuff for a month. Oh and coming from a dynamic language background at that ? Not saying can't be done just saying time till contributing is probably weeks-months. With go it's probably days.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    > I honestly have no clue how someone without low level experience (eg. never did systems level programming) even approaches Rust. In my personal experience you do this by writing your programs in such a way as not to require complex ownership. I had an easy time writing web services where the only cross-request shared state was a database handle. I had a hard time when I had to write a websocket document sync serverwhere I needed per-document global state shared between all the handlers, and I eventually gave up and moved to a model where a language with an easier concurrency story called rust code.
    - phamilton 4y ago
      This. Implementing an http endpoint is pretty straightforward. Newcomers may struggle with copy vs reference semantics (and that just takes time), but otherwise it's not too different from other statically typed http work. You define your input/output structs, you grab a database connection, you perform a query, and return it. No lifetimes. No Arcs or Mutexes or Rc or RefCell. We generally consider our rust backend as two parts: application code and library code. We intend for our application code to be approachable by full stack developers and not require deep rust expertise to use. Our library code can be a bit more complicated, and there we see a bigger ramp up and frankly some self selection among our team and that's fine.
tiffanyh 4y ago
Off-topic: has Oxide shipped anything yet? Geniunely curious since the company was found 3+ years ago (2019). https://oxide.computer/blog/introducing-the-oxide-computer-company https://oxide.computer/blog/introducing-the-oxide-computer-c...
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  Server racks? Not just yet! Soon though. As we get closer, we’ve talked about it more and more, see this recent Oxide and Friends, for example: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1200412 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1200412 We also have a ton of projects on our GitHub, including the web framework we developed for our API that I’m alluding to above. Of course, that’s not the core product, but you can see what we’ve got going on.
  - dsincl12 4y ago
    Would that be dropshot you're referring to?
    - steveklabnik 4y ago
      Dropshot is the framework, omicron is the control plane implementation, which uses dropshot.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
evntdrvn 4y ago
I’ve been working primarily in .NET the last five years, and have been transitioning to Rust professionally the last few years. For some reason, people act like being a C# or Java dev means that you’re an idiot. If you’re skilled enough to be writing quality high-performance code in those languages, learning Rust is not a huge barrier…
- saurik 4y ago
  I agree with you: learning a new language, sometimes in the heat of the moment without even knowing the language existed before, is a thing skilled software developers are able to do remarkably quickly, even if they haven't specially gone out of their way to train for that skill, as, in the real world, you end up dealing with so many different languages--as a C#/Java developer you probably also have had to work with SQL, either bash or PowerShell, can't really avoid JavaScript, likely had to drop to C/C++ at some point to build a way to access a "legacy" component--that it is very difficult to avoid having the right generalizations happen accidentally in your brain. But, I work with a lot of college students who are just beginning to learn software development, and the realization that that kind of generalization is possible is not obvious; and a lot of people who are only a few years into their career--but maybe think they are pretty damned good at it (I look back at myself when I had a mere 10 years of actual-real-world experience and think just how much I still had to learn to become who I am today... I am thankful I worked with some gods and always knew I had a long way to go)--not only have a hard time learning a new language (I remember when I was in high school trying to learn Pascal after I had spent years coding in Visual Basic and even getting paid to do so, and thinking I knew C... I did not ;P) but internalize how daunting it is and then go really far out of their way to avoid learning new languages (which, thankfully, I could not as high schools at the time were ping through a big upset in curriculums and so we learned a new language every year for a while and I got recruited to help my AP Computer Science teacher as he also was having to adjust way too quickly through Pascal, C/C++, and Java/JavaScript). And it is actually quite remarkable how well people manage to do at this, using IDEs to avoid command lines and ORM technology and DSL compilers to avoid having to use SQL or other languages, they glom onto whatever ridiculous interop mechanism they can that prevents them from learning about low-level languages... and I think it really does hurt them, and I remember running into some software developers who did so well that they never managed to get to the right generalizations and they are now old and can still only program in one language (the same way I have a really really really hard time speaking in any language other than English); but like, most developers, no matter how hard they try, eventually do get enough exposure to enough at least slightly-different languages to get this skill (which is, when I get hired to teach courses, what I try to accelerate: Comparative Machine Language Morphology ;P). But like, due to us all living in the Eternal September--and I do not just mean online: I was shocked recently when I learned how many CS students there are at most of the other Universities (it turns out the one I still live at is an extreme minority with only a few percent of the population being Computer Science and only half the students being engineering at all)--not only are we going to end up interacting directly with a number of people who actually do find learning new languages hard (and think it must fundamentally be hard for everyone forever), but I think we are going to run into a lot of managers on the front lines of trying to build businesses out of cogs (a practice I dislike on a number of grounds, but fully admit, if you can pull it off, is probably an extremely powerful and efficient way to do industrial/corporate engineering) who are also extremely resigned to the notion that the early-stage people they hire are oft incapable of learning new languages quickly enough to truly be a usable cog, as like... do they really even want to hire someone who has as much experience as you must (as the way you worded your comment implies you've been coding a lot longer than the mere 5 years you have been coding in Java/C# ;P).
DeathArrow 4y ago
>At Oxide, we do "web API layer" stuff in Rust. We also don't require that candidates be Rust experts, though obviously experience helps. Many of those people who are "proficient in C#, JS, Java, Go, Python and the like" can absolutely write Rust, even if there is some slowness at first. Many of developers who are skilled in X can learn Y. But that doesn't mean you should hire X developers and ask the to do Y. The process should be easy. Identify the tool which is most fitted for the project. Hire developers proficient in that tool.

whitepoplar 4y ago

How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust? In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023?

arch-ninja 4y ago
6 months if you're a college-sophmore-level student doing it part-time (my own experience + numbers), I'd estimate 3-4 weeks if you were spending more than 3hrs/day on it and knew 2 other languages.
- oneplane 4y ago
  That would be my estimate as well. I've seem some porting between Go and Rust (both ways) where either way an experienced developer with some multi-language knowledge got up and running in a day, writing useful code in a week and being proficient enough to do normal sprint work in about another week. It mostly depends on what you have in you brain, what you see when you look at code, and if you understand why you do what you do rather than repeating a trick and hoping it works, and I suppose that is a combination of theory and experience.
steveklabnik 4y ago
> How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust? I think it's exceedingly difficult to make such a broad generalization. There's a number of factors here at play, but for example, I think the struggles of a Rubyist learning Rust are very different than a C developer learning Rust, and are very different than someone who's proficient with both who is learning Rust. It's also hard because there's also just other random factors. There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. Sometimes it takes coming back two or three times. Do you count all of that dead time? Something in there helped, but it's unclear what, or why this affects some people. Another theme of stories I've heard is a sort of Golidlocks situation about how "right" you think the compiler is. Some folks have the attitude that the compiler is to be seen, not heard, and should stop nagging them about things. Those folks tend to really struggle with Rust, even if they have lots of relevant experience previously. Likewise, some folks trust the compiler so completely that they will lose a bunch of time when a compiler suggestion leads them down the wrong path. Luckily, that problem is easier to fix than the former one, and is rarer and rarer every day. But these sorts of attributes are completely separate than what we think of when we talk "competency" of devs. > In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023? This sounds tautological, but bear with me: it's whatever path gets you to learn Rust. That sounds trite but what I mean is that different people have different needs (see above) and so need different things. There is no one best way. For some people, the book works really, really well. For others, they either hate the writing style, or the pace, or just something ineffable. I wouldn't say that they're wrong for that, just that they'd be served by different strategies. What I will say is that "I know other languages, I can just kinda start coding and pick it up" tends to not work for almost anyone. You either need to be quick to ask questions from the community, or be willing to do some reading, or you may run into some struggles that will take you longer to overcome than if you were willing to get some help. Folks who take advantage of community resources, broadly speaking, tend to do better than folks that think they can write some code and learn solely through errors, as Rust's semantics are just unique enough that some background and explanation can be extremely helpful.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  > There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. This was my experience, I came back a year or two later, and both I and the language had improved. I'm not sure who improved more, but whatever happened I'm really enjoying the language now.
eYrKEC2 4y ago
My current employer has a web backend and CLI in Rust. I joined the company having only dabbled in Rust, but having a background in C++, python, javascript, and verilog. It took me a month to feel able to do things and 3 months to feel reasonably comfortable. Still haven't mastered it after 1.5 years. Certain pieces of the rust ecosystem have their own learning curve such as diesel orm.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  I was using Chat GPT to learn rust but most of the examples it generated were pretty old (mysql 4 vs now at 21).
  - joshka 4y ago
    As a fellow rust n00b, one of the big problems I'm seeing with using ChatGPT to generate rust is that it often doesn't have a good model of ownership semantics. This has caused me lots of burnt time working through plausible but not accurate solutions to problems.
    - andrewstuart 4y ago
      You’re saying AI has trouble learning Rust too?
      - joshka 4y ago
        Lol. Yup. Though it’s possible that it was overfitting its response to my noob questions. I’ve had better luck since.
joshka 4y ago
The tokio tutorial is (mostly) pretty well written and worth a read. There's a lot of good docs like rust-by-example and the rust book, but for my liking, those both seem to spend too much time on each topics rather than distilling the info into smaller denser topics. This is probably great for newer developers but more difficult for someone that wants to learn the 30 second version of something rather than the 5 minute version. It's possible that punching these books through a GPT prompt like "Extract the salient points from the following:" might help?

makestuff 4y ago

Not sure if rust is significantly harder to learn than Go, but as a Java dev I was able to pickup go and make contributions in around a week or so. Yeah I was slower, but we had some really good Go devs who had all of the tooling and packages laid out with best practices. This made it easy for new devs to jump into it. I think the issue happens when you have a new rust/go/javascript/etc. dev trying to setup a project for the first time.

moonchrome 4y ago
Yes Rust is significantly harder than go. It's diametrically opposite if there was a circle of complexity. I honestly have no clue how someone without low level experience (eg. never did systems level programming) even approaches Rust. The ownership model makes sense to me but if I had to grok manual memory management and rust abstractions on top of it at the same time I think I would be unable to contribute even trivial stuff for a month. Oh and coming from a dynamic language background at that ? Not saying can't be done just saying time till contributing is probably weeks-months. With go it's probably days.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  > I honestly have no clue how someone without low level experience (eg. never did systems level programming) even approaches Rust. In my personal experience you do this by writing your programs in such a way as not to require complex ownership. I had an easy time writing web services where the only cross-request shared state was a database handle. I had a hard time when I had to write a websocket document sync serverwhere I needed per-document global state shared between all the handlers, and I eventually gave up and moved to a model where a language with an easier concurrency story called rust code.
  - phamilton 4y ago
    This. Implementing an http endpoint is pretty straightforward. Newcomers may struggle with copy vs reference semantics (and that just takes time), but otherwise it's not too different from other statically typed http work. You define your input/output structs, you grab a database connection, you perform a query, and return it. No lifetimes. No Arcs or Mutexes or Rc or RefCell. We generally consider our rust backend as two parts: application code and library code. We intend for our application code to be approachable by full stack developers and not require deep rust expertise to use. Our library code can be a bit more complicated, and there we see a bigger ramp up and frankly some self selection among our team and that's fine.

tiffanyh 4y ago

Off-topic: has Oxide shipped anything yet? Geniunely curious since the company was found 3+ years ago (2019). https://oxide.computer/blog/introducing-the-oxide-computer-company https://oxide.computer/blog/introducing-the-oxide-computer-c...

steveklabnik 4y ago
Server racks? Not just yet! Soon though. As we get closer, we’ve talked about it more and more, see this recent Oxide and Friends, for example: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1200412 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1200412 We also have a ton of projects on our GitHub, including the web framework we developed for our API that I’m alluding to above. Of course, that’s not the core product, but you can see what we’ve got going on.
- dsincl12 4y ago
  Would that be dropshot you're referring to?
  - steveklabnik 4y ago
    Dropshot is the framework, omicron is the control plane implementation, which uses dropshot.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

evntdrvn 4y ago

I’ve been working primarily in .NET the last five years, and have been transitioning to Rust professionally the last few years. For some reason, people act like being a C# or Java dev means that you’re an idiot. If you’re skilled enough to be writing quality high-performance code in those languages, learning Rust is not a huge barrier…

saurik 4y ago
I agree with you: learning a new language, sometimes in the heat of the moment without even knowing the language existed before, is a thing skilled software developers are able to do remarkably quickly, even if they haven't specially gone out of their way to train for that skill, as, in the real world, you end up dealing with so many different languages--as a C#/Java developer you probably also have had to work with SQL, either bash or PowerShell, can't really avoid JavaScript, likely had to drop to C/C++ at some point to build a way to access a "legacy" component--that it is very difficult to avoid having the right generalizations happen accidentally in your brain. But, I work with a lot of college students who are just beginning to learn software development, and the realization that that kind of generalization is possible is not obvious; and a lot of people who are only a few years into their career--but maybe think they are pretty damned good at it (I look back at myself when I had a mere 10 years of actual-real-world experience and think just how much I still had to learn to become who I am today... I am thankful I worked with some gods and always knew I had a long way to go)--not only have a hard time learning a new language (I remember when I was in high school trying to learn Pascal after I had spent years coding in Visual Basic and even getting paid to do so, and thinking I knew C... I did not ;P) but internalize how daunting it is and then go really far out of their way to avoid learning new languages (which, thankfully, I could not as high schools at the time were ping through a big upset in curriculums and so we learned a new language every year for a while and I got recruited to help my AP Computer Science teacher as he also was having to adjust way too quickly through Pascal, C/C++, and Java/JavaScript). And it is actually quite remarkable how well people manage to do at this, using IDEs to avoid command lines and ORM technology and DSL compilers to avoid having to use SQL or other languages, they glom onto whatever ridiculous interop mechanism they can that prevents them from learning about low-level languages... and I think it really does hurt them, and I remember running into some software developers who did so well that they never managed to get to the right generalizations and they are now old and can still only program in one language (the same way I have a really really really hard time speaking in any language other than English); but like, most developers, no matter how hard they try, eventually do get enough exposure to enough at least slightly-different languages to get this skill (which is, when I get hired to teach courses, what I try to accelerate: Comparative Machine Language Morphology ;P). But like, due to us all living in the Eternal September--and I do not just mean online: I was shocked recently when I learned how many CS students there are at most of the other Universities (it turns out the one I still live at is an extreme minority with only a few percent of the population being Computer Science and only half the students being engineering at all)--not only are we going to end up interacting directly with a number of people who actually do find learning new languages hard (and think it must fundamentally be hard for everyone forever), but I think we are going to run into a lot of managers on the front lines of trying to build businesses out of cogs (a practice I dislike on a number of grounds, but fully admit, if you can pull it off, is probably an extremely powerful and efficient way to do industrial/corporate engineering) who are also extremely resigned to the notion that the early-stage people they hire are oft incapable of learning new languages quickly enough to truly be a usable cog, as like... do they really even want to hire someone who has as much experience as you must (as the way you worded your comment implies you've been coding a lot longer than the mere 5 years you have been coding in Java/C# ;P).

DeathArrow 4y ago

>At Oxide, we do "web API layer" stuff in Rust. We also don't require that candidates be Rust experts, though obviously experience helps. Many of those people who are "proficient in C#, JS, Java, Go, Python and the like" can absolutely write Rust, even if there is some slowness at first. Many of developers who are skilled in X can learn Y. But that doesn't mean you should hire X developers and ask the to do Y. The process should be easy. Identify the tool which is most fitted for the project. Hire developers proficient in that tool.