Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> The documentation also assumes the reader know what heap and stack are but surprisingly (not) it doesn't bother you.

Not sure if it counts as documentation, but the Rust Book actually has a very good explanation of stack and heap. I know because that's how I learnt about these concepts myself.

View on HN

Is Rust as first programming language a thing?

It is. There are regularly people new to programming posting questions in r/rust. Although even there most people encourage newbies to consider learning python first. Rust as a first low-level language is very common though. Lots of folks who are interested in getting closer to the metal but are put off by the idiosyncrasies and lack of guard rails of C and C++.

The book is not designed for folks who have never programmed before. However, many people in our audience have never dealt with the stack and the heap as concepts. You can go an entire career and only use languages that don’t have that distinction.

As someone who has been interested in Rust for a long time but has only in the past few weeks had the opportunity to use it in non-trivial ways, which of course then involves lots of documentation reading: Thanks, Steve!

Yeah there seems to be a huge influx of webdev people. They don't have lot of idea about stack and heap.

It's certainly better than C++ as a starting language.

And, if you're just starting out, is Rust really more alien than C?

C, quite famously, needs you to understand at least double indirection of pointers (pointer to pointer of type) to be even mildly useful in the language. You can go a long way in Rust before needing to hit that level of complication.

I still wouldn't recommend C or Rust for a first programming language, but Rust really isn't that bad compared to the alternatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com