Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

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I had an awful time when I started using Rust because I had a strong (object oriented) view of how to structure my code. At one point where nothing seemed to work and I didn't manage to get anything to compile I just was like: "ok, I give up Rust, I will do it your way".

From then on everything worked surprisingly easy.

The 3 main things that make Rust great (besides thenusual selling points) are IMO:

- the library manager/dependency managment is great

- Even if you are never gonna use Rust again, some of the lessons you have to learn when learning Rust are universally useful. Thinking about ownership and race conditions the Rust way will certainly help you tackle some parricularily hard issues with multithreaded code in other languages as well.

- The amount of things you can rake as a given within Rust code is very high. If it compiles it usually works. If it doesn't it gives helpful indications why. These indications help you to understand your code better.

After years of dynamically typed / interpreted languages, I decided I wanted to learn a statically typed language and so I to set out to trial both Go and Rust. Rust was a painful experience. I kept trying to pass around simple types and constantly hit compiler failures.

I then set up Go and got started. Fell in love with it, I was immediately 10x more productive then I was with rust. I also found reading other people's code far more easier as well, where rust would have all this (for me) difficult syntax.

I want to like rust, but I honestly don't think I am smart enough.

Coming from dynamically typed high level languages, you're learning two things at the same time when you're learning rust:

1) Low level programming 2) Typed programming

Both of which are difficult.

I would suggest learning one of Haskell or Scala and one of C or C++ first, and then trying Rust again.

As I said, I am getting on great with go now.

Rust is sometimes a painful experience because it forces you to deal upfront with an important concept other languages play fast and loose with.

You can absolutely get productive more quickly in other languages as a result. But to me, developers who take the time to get over that hurdle by and large become dramatically more productive in the long run, and that’s before you take into account the fact that their code will have near-optimal performance and be virtually bulletproof.

There’s a reason we’re regularly seeing best-in-class general purpose tools and libraries coming out of the Rust ecosystem.

The thing for me was: I realized the type system is not something to fight with, but something that you can utilize to always have certain guarantuees about what is going on, which can make it extremely easy to reason about code especially after your program reaches a certain size.

But to profit from this you have to reach a level where you are beyond fighting with the ownership model and with data types.

For small/quick scripting stuff I still go to python, because some problems can just be solved faster with it. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. It really depends on the scale of programs and the needed reliability IMO.

Thanks, I don't know that I am fighting it, its more that I just can't figure it out. Maybe I need to try again. I read the rust book last time, but large parts of it went over my head.

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