5 ms·

I'm very happy I dug into rust half a decade ago. The language has been fun to learn as it evolved futures and async/await, and the future continues to look pro

I'm very happy I dug into rust half a decade ago. The language has been fun to learn as it evolved futures and async/await, and the future continues to look promising. I've had the pleasure of working professionally in Rust twice in my life (once at Full story, now at Deno) and I can say it's by far my favourite language to work in. I did some Rust training with Ferrous but by far the most useful way to learn was just picking up a project and building it.

brabel 3y ago
I envy people who can pick up Rust and just get stuff done. I've tried many times but every time, I find it far more difficult to build things than any other language I know, so I just give up and go back to "easier" languages.
- yboris 3y ago
  I suspect this is about experience. I had experience with PHP, JavaScript, and Python, but when at first coding in Go it would take me as much as 10x as long. But with more practice it's now only about 2x as long as in other languages. Keep practicing ;)
  - brabel 3y ago
    I think my experience is actually the problem. I don't have enough patience anymore to spend lots of time trying to understand errors where I have zero idea why it's complaining, when I know the same thing in another language works totally fine the first time I try (and without bugs, it's mostly lifetime issues or the lovely borrow checker, which don't even exist in other languages). But I do keep trying Rust, because the alternatives as I see it, C and Zig, have their own problems that are bigger (C's build tools and lack of package management, very weak type checking and unavoidable UB, and Zig's overall lack of maturity and consequently tooling). By the way, I can write code very easily in Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Dart/JS/TS/Go/Lisp.
    - db48x 3y ago
      Yea, that's a common complaint coming from other safe languages where the safety is accomplished by runtime features (such as garbage collection) instead of compile–time rules. I think that most programs should be written in easier languages than Rust, since most of the time the engineering cost of creating a system is higher than the cost of running it. You can rewrite it in Rust once your system is large enough that eliminating the garbage collector will save you a few million dollars a year. By then you’ll have a complete understanding of the requirements, and you won’t have to experiment to get it right. Use a language like Lisp, which is designed for easy and fast experimentation, to write the first version of your software.
      - Turskarama 3y ago
        >most of the time the engineering cost of creating a system is higher than the cost of running it. And most of the time the cost of _maintaining_ the system is higher than the cost of creating it. This is where Rust truly excels, it makes it much harder to write any hard to find bugs.
        db48x 3y ago
        Yes, I include maintenance in the cost of running the system. And I agree with you that a well–written Rust program usually has quite low maintenance costs. In principle you should be able to approach zero maintenance costs with any language, but writing your system in Rust generally means you have abandoned complexities like garbage collection. Garbage collection speeds up development by an order of magnitude or more, but at the cost of having to monitor the performance of the GC, tune it as loads change and computers get more and more memory but don’t get any faster at accessing it, etc, etc. Exceptions are another thing that speeds up development at the cost of maintenance down the road. You have to log the exceptions that are happening and monitor them to make sure that they are rare otherwise they’ll silently become more common over time as your program gets more complex. Meanwhile Rust’s explicit error handling really makes you think at every step about exactly what odd conditions your program might encounter. If you use Rust’s type system correctly, you can encode very specific information about exactly which errors are possible or impossible at every point in your system. It’s more work up front but it saves a huge amount of time down the road.
- jbandela1 3y ago
  I think previous experience programming in C++ can be helpful, in picking up Rust faster. For me, in large part, the borrow checker is encoding in the compiler rules that you should be following in C++ anyway. A few hours debugging dangling references or iterator invalidation will make you appreciate what the borrow checker is trying to prevent. You also have experience knowing the difference between pass by reference, pass by const reference, copy, and move. Also, if you want to keep your sanity, you will learn to take ownership seriously. Deciding what owns what and whether objects will be owned by the scope (on the stack), be owned by unique_ptr, or be shared with shared_ptr is a large part of designing a C++ program. Again these all map very neatly onto Rust idioms, and as a benefit are enforced by the compiler. Coming from a garbage collected language where you previously did not have to care about things like that, and now, not only being forced to care, but having the compiler yell at you for every mistake can be a pretty big learning curve. However, I would say that not knowing C++ doesn't mean that you can't learn Rust, only that it may take a little longer because you have to learn new concepts with regards to memory management and ownership, and so give yourself some slack and do not be discouraged.
  - returningfory2 3y ago
    > For me, in large part, the borrow checker is encoding in the compiler rules that you should be following in C++ anyway. My experience was sort of the inverse of yours: I knew a little C++ before learning Rust, and being educated by the borrow checker has really helped me writing C++.
    - mrtngslr 3y ago
      I've seen that too: having experience with Rust made C++ feel easy. I looked at C++ many years ago but never used it professionally. About 6-7 years ago, I learnt Rust and a few years later, I started working full time in a C++ team at Google. There are many things in the Google C++ Style Guide[1] that reminds me of Rust, from the ban on exceptions to the use of `std::optional` for optional inputs and outputs. [1]: https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html
  - 3y ago
- dceddia 3y ago
  I agree with the OP that the best way to learn it is to work through a real project, but I wouldn’t necessarily equate that with “picking it up and just getting stuff done”. At least, that’s not how it went for me, anyway! I hit all the real roadblocks along the way and it took a good few months before I felt actually comfortable. Until then, it felt like I kept running up against mismatches between how I wanted to solve a problem and how Rust wanted me to do it. It was more difficult to build stuff and I had to rewrite things many times. For background, I had worked with C/C++, Java, JS/TS, Ruby, and some others prior to Rust, and it was the first time in a while that learning a new language was pretty hard even after the syntax made sense.
  - freeopinion 3y ago
    The first time I ever experienced lane assist in a car was in a borrowed Honda Accord. Any time I drifted towards the lane line without signalling, an alarm would go off. This doesn't mean the Accord is hard to drive. It's not even hard to learn to drive. I already knew I was supposed to signal before making a lane change. It just made me concerned about how often I must have drifted over lines in other cars without lane assist. "I'm a great driver. I've driven fine for decades without lane assist. I don't need lane assist." I added lane assist to the list of features I wanted in my next car. You know, for my kid's sake (glances left and right). I felt a lot like that with Rust.
- bandika 3y ago
  What I find difficult is to switch my 2 decade C++ career into a rust job, despite learned Rust and finished some hobby projects touching ui, async and http server/client in Rust. Somehow most Rust job is about crypto currency.
- paxys 3y ago
  I find that a lot of people just pick wrong kinds of projects to dig their teeth into Rust with. It is a systems programming language. If you don't know much about it and set out to build a website, things are inevitably going to go south.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Actix and Axum are so easy. They're a drop in replacement for Golang or Flask. I'd encourage people to start their Rust journey with little web services.
  - freeopinion 3y ago
    One of my first projects involved linked lists. Oh boy was that the right wrong project to start with. I've never written linked lists the same way in other languages since. Rust made me better in languages that aren't Rust.
    - yeck 3y ago
      Hah, yes. I thought I'd get started with Rust going through building some basic data structures. Linked lists were near the top of my list so I didn't get very far with that first approach XD
      - tialaramex 3y ago
        If you really meant this, and you ever want to learn Rust, you could do worse than begin with Aria's "Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists" https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ You can skip her explanation of why the Linked List is a bad first data structure, and get straight to doing, but if you have no idea why a very experienced programmer would think this data structure is terrible (so terrible she tried but failed to have it removed from Rust's Standard Library before Rust 1.0) you should read her whole PSA too.
        yeck 3y ago
- echelon 3y ago
  Pick up Actix or Axum and clone() and unwrap() all day for your first month. Write some little web servers for fun. Sqlx is great for sql, and you can do some heavy hitting stuff like media streaming and transcoding as you get deeper into it. It's got good torch bindings for ML too. Before long you'll be running the compiler in your head and rapidly churning out code.
  - maleldil 3y ago
    A beginner should use expect instead of unwrap. It makes you faster because you still don't have to handle errors but allows you to add context.
- mamcx 3y ago
  Have you tried asking? The Rust reddit was a major reason I stop hitting my head against the wall. In the past, `&str` was just so huge block for me (now I wonder why!) and instead of getting stuck just ask about it. I think was a stream of a few question on reddit that unblock Rust for me after like 3 months of going nowhere.
  - iknowstuff 3y ago
    These days you can just ask ChatGPT
  - brabel 3y ago
    Yes, I was on the Rust Discord for a while... without their help I wouldn't have even gone past the most basic things, so yeah, it did help... it was funny to see the huge stream of people asking the same questions over and over again :D. After a short while, it gets really tiring... but like others are saying, now we have ChatGPT to ask and it never gets tired!
zokier 3y ago
I'm glad I've been following rust since <1.0 when it was lot smaller (tbh because it was missing stuff), I don't know if I'd have the perseverance to start learning it today from scratch just because the depth it has. Admittedly having bit of C++ background smoothed the curve too.
echelon 3y ago
I wasn't aware FullStory used Rust! That's good to know. I was worried I might have a hard time hiring folks in Atlanta with Rust experience. The more Rust proliferates, the better. It's good at client, server, systems, and so many other things.
cjvirtucio 3y ago
most fun I've had with a programming language in years
wilmoore 3y ago
I'm disappointed that you missed the opportunity for a well-placed pun there :)-

brabel 3y ago

I envy people who can pick up Rust and just get stuff done. I've tried many times but every time, I find it far more difficult to build things than any other language I know, so I just give up and go back to "easier" languages.

yboris 3y ago
I suspect this is about experience. I had experience with PHP, JavaScript, and Python, but when at first coding in Go it would take me as much as 10x as long. But with more practice it's now only about 2x as long as in other languages. Keep practicing ;)
- brabel 3y ago
  I think my experience is actually the problem. I don't have enough patience anymore to spend lots of time trying to understand errors where I have zero idea why it's complaining, when I know the same thing in another language works totally fine the first time I try (and without bugs, it's mostly lifetime issues or the lovely borrow checker, which don't even exist in other languages). But I do keep trying Rust, because the alternatives as I see it, C and Zig, have their own problems that are bigger (C's build tools and lack of package management, very weak type checking and unavoidable UB, and Zig's overall lack of maturity and consequently tooling). By the way, I can write code very easily in Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Dart/JS/TS/Go/Lisp.
  - db48x 3y ago
    Yea, that's a common complaint coming from other safe languages where the safety is accomplished by runtime features (such as garbage collection) instead of compile–time rules. I think that most programs should be written in easier languages than Rust, since most of the time the engineering cost of creating a system is higher than the cost of running it. You can rewrite it in Rust once your system is large enough that eliminating the garbage collector will save you a few million dollars a year. By then you’ll have a complete understanding of the requirements, and you won’t have to experiment to get it right. Use a language like Lisp, which is designed for easy and fast experimentation, to write the first version of your software.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      >most of the time the engineering cost of creating a system is higher than the cost of running it. And most of the time the cost of _maintaining_ the system is higher than the cost of creating it. This is where Rust truly excels, it makes it much harder to write any hard to find bugs.
      - db48x 3y ago
        Yes, I include maintenance in the cost of running the system. And I agree with you that a well–written Rust program usually has quite low maintenance costs. In principle you should be able to approach zero maintenance costs with any language, but writing your system in Rust generally means you have abandoned complexities like garbage collection. Garbage collection speeds up development by an order of magnitude or more, but at the cost of having to monitor the performance of the GC, tune it as loads change and computers get more and more memory but don’t get any faster at accessing it, etc, etc. Exceptions are another thing that speeds up development at the cost of maintenance down the road. You have to log the exceptions that are happening and monitor them to make sure that they are rare otherwise they’ll silently become more common over time as your program gets more complex. Meanwhile Rust’s explicit error handling really makes you think at every step about exactly what odd conditions your program might encounter. If you use Rust’s type system correctly, you can encode very specific information about exactly which errors are possible or impossible at every point in your system. It’s more work up front but it saves a huge amount of time down the road.
jbandela1 3y ago
I think previous experience programming in C++ can be helpful, in picking up Rust faster. For me, in large part, the borrow checker is encoding in the compiler rules that you should be following in C++ anyway. A few hours debugging dangling references or iterator invalidation will make you appreciate what the borrow checker is trying to prevent. You also have experience knowing the difference between pass by reference, pass by const reference, copy, and move. Also, if you want to keep your sanity, you will learn to take ownership seriously. Deciding what owns what and whether objects will be owned by the scope (on the stack), be owned by unique_ptr, or be shared with shared_ptr is a large part of designing a C++ program. Again these all map very neatly onto Rust idioms, and as a benefit are enforced by the compiler. Coming from a garbage collected language where you previously did not have to care about things like that, and now, not only being forced to care, but having the compiler yell at you for every mistake can be a pretty big learning curve. However, I would say that not knowing C++ doesn't mean that you can't learn Rust, only that it may take a little longer because you have to learn new concepts with regards to memory management and ownership, and so give yourself some slack and do not be discouraged.
- returningfory2 3y ago
  > For me, in large part, the borrow checker is encoding in the compiler rules that you should be following in C++ anyway. My experience was sort of the inverse of yours: I knew a little C++ before learning Rust, and being educated by the borrow checker has really helped me writing C++.
  - mrtngslr 3y ago
    I've seen that too: having experience with Rust made C++ feel easy. I looked at C++ many years ago but never used it professionally. About 6-7 years ago, I learnt Rust and a few years later, I started working full time in a C++ team at Google. There are many things in the Google C++ Style Guide[1] that reminds me of Rust, from the ban on exceptions to the use of `std::optional` for optional inputs and outputs. [1]: https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html
- 3y ago
dceddia 3y ago
I agree with the OP that the best way to learn it is to work through a real project, but I wouldn’t necessarily equate that with “picking it up and just getting stuff done”. At least, that’s not how it went for me, anyway! I hit all the real roadblocks along the way and it took a good few months before I felt actually comfortable. Until then, it felt like I kept running up against mismatches between how I wanted to solve a problem and how Rust wanted me to do it. It was more difficult to build stuff and I had to rewrite things many times. For background, I had worked with C/C++, Java, JS/TS, Ruby, and some others prior to Rust, and it was the first time in a while that learning a new language was pretty hard even after the syntax made sense.
- freeopinion 3y ago
  The first time I ever experienced lane assist in a car was in a borrowed Honda Accord. Any time I drifted towards the lane line without signalling, an alarm would go off. This doesn't mean the Accord is hard to drive. It's not even hard to learn to drive. I already knew I was supposed to signal before making a lane change. It just made me concerned about how often I must have drifted over lines in other cars without lane assist. "I'm a great driver. I've driven fine for decades without lane assist. I don't need lane assist." I added lane assist to the list of features I wanted in my next car. You know, for my kid's sake (glances left and right). I felt a lot like that with Rust.
bandika 3y ago
What I find difficult is to switch my 2 decade C++ career into a rust job, despite learned Rust and finished some hobby projects touching ui, async and http server/client in Rust. Somehow most Rust job is about crypto currency.
paxys 3y ago
I find that a lot of people just pick wrong kinds of projects to dig their teeth into Rust with. It is a systems programming language. If you don't know much about it and set out to build a website, things are inevitably going to go south.
- echelon 3y ago
  Actix and Axum are so easy. They're a drop in replacement for Golang or Flask. I'd encourage people to start their Rust journey with little web services.
- freeopinion 3y ago
  One of my first projects involved linked lists. Oh boy was that the right wrong project to start with. I've never written linked lists the same way in other languages since. Rust made me better in languages that aren't Rust.
  - yeck 3y ago
    Hah, yes. I thought I'd get started with Rust going through building some basic data structures. Linked lists were near the top of my list so I didn't get very far with that first approach XD
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      If you really meant this, and you ever want to learn Rust, you could do worse than begin with Aria's "Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists" https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ You can skip her explanation of why the Linked List is a bad first data structure, and get straight to doing, but if you have no idea why a very experienced programmer would think this data structure is terrible (so terrible she tried but failed to have it removed from Rust's Standard Library before Rust 1.0) you should read her whole PSA too.
      - yeck 3y ago
echelon 3y ago
Pick up Actix or Axum and clone() and unwrap() all day for your first month. Write some little web servers for fun. Sqlx is great for sql, and you can do some heavy hitting stuff like media streaming and transcoding as you get deeper into it. It's got good torch bindings for ML too. Before long you'll be running the compiler in your head and rapidly churning out code.
- maleldil 3y ago
  A beginner should use expect instead of unwrap. It makes you faster because you still don't have to handle errors but allows you to add context.
mamcx 3y ago
Have you tried asking? The Rust reddit was a major reason I stop hitting my head against the wall. In the past, `&str` was just so huge block for me (now I wonder why!) and instead of getting stuck just ask about it. I think was a stream of a few question on reddit that unblock Rust for me after like 3 months of going nowhere.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  These days you can just ask ChatGPT
- brabel 3y ago
  Yes, I was on the Rust Discord for a while... without their help I wouldn't have even gone past the most basic things, so yeah, it did help... it was funny to see the huge stream of people asking the same questions over and over again :D. After a short while, it gets really tiring... but like others are saying, now we have ChatGPT to ask and it never gets tired!

zokier 3y ago

I'm glad I've been following rust since <1.0 when it was lot smaller (tbh because it was missing stuff), I don't know if I'd have the perseverance to start learning it today from scratch just because the depth it has. Admittedly having bit of C++ background smoothed the curve too.

echelon 3y ago

I wasn't aware FullStory used Rust! That's good to know. I was worried I might have a hard time hiring folks in Atlanta with Rust experience. The more Rust proliferates, the better. It's good at client, server, systems, and so many other things.

cjvirtucio 3y ago

most fun I've had with a programming language in years

wilmoore 3y ago

I'm disappointed that you missed the opportunity for a well-placed pun there :)-