Re: transitioning to Rust:

For context: I started out a passionate and evangelical Python "duck typing" proponent. Eventually migrated to Node, as it let me in the browser via JS (i'm fond of web tech). Eventually Go caught my eye due to types (before Typescript really existed) and so i stayed there for a while. Each of these lasted ~5 years.

These days i'm a heavy and solely Rust user.. going on ~3 years now iirc. Both in my work life, and home life.

The more experience i got in my career the more i loved types, so Rust's type system wasn't a shock to me. Yes, it was the most in depth typing i had used, but for me it was a natural transition. I was wanting types to solve problems for me. Rust felt very natural in that sense.

I advocate that Rust can be easy to learn if you focus on your bite sizes. Learn Rust with a keen eye for what looks like big and small bytes, and never exceed your mouth size. In the beginning lifetimes are scary, so avoid them - clone or `Arc` like mad. Be wary of heavy generic usage. Rust has lots of rope to hand yourself with, should you go looking for a noose.

I can’t really speak to the market right now, but I transitioned to Rust from Python and Typescript in April of 2021. I started learning Rust in I think 2018. I had a couple of decently sized Rust open source projects under my belt, one of which I had managed to get some time to work on at $previous_job, since we integrated it into our react client via WASM. The company I joined is working on HTTP network proxy stuff in relation to fraud prevention.

I didn’t have any professional experience in low level languages. I had some hobby/school experience with C and C++, but nothing recent.

Learning rust was not too bad. Took me a couple of tries to get going, but once I got the basics down, expanding from there was pretty straightforward.

At the time I was looking for a job, a solid majority of Rust jobs were in cryptocurrency or adjacent companies. I wasn’t interested in that, but I still found plenty of places to apply to. I got responses from almost all of them, and was able to pick between my top choices. My understanding is that now there are many more non-crypto jobs than there were, although I don’t know to what extent that has been affected by recent economic conditions.