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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

Is C/C++ knowledge important for learning Rust?

Opinions are split. Many people have learned it without any previous C or C++ knowledge. Some argue that you can't truly appreciate Rust until you've written them. It can be helpful, but it can also be harmful.

I am still in my first year of programming and Rust is my first systems language. I don't know C++, just enough for 'gists'. I had already read/skimmed Computer Organisation and Design: RISC-V, and Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. I worked through 'The 2018 Rust Book' at a fairly decent clip as a result of that context. I reckon that mostly sidesteps the 'help/hinder' tradeoff, though I'm not humble in saying it took a fair bit of dedication (maybe more than simply learning C++ fundamentals).

Edit: actually I'm well into my second year of programming now, time flies...

It's not. Rust exposes similar lower-level issues that C/C++ also deal with, like memory allocation on stack vs heap, but you'll pick them up while learning Rust one way or another.

In some ways C/C++ is a hindrance when learning Rust, because although Rust has many features superficially similar to C/C++'s features, the details are different and programming patterns are different, so you'd need to un-learn some C/C++ habits.

Not really. It'd help speed up the process for some areas, but it's not that significant as rust has other influences and its own unique areas.

I've found that the Rust code that I've written is stylistically more similar to Haskell. However, while references in Rust are a distinct concept from references in C++, they both have a distinction between a pointer to an object and the value of an object.

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