I have this feeling that I am wasting my time by not learning Rust.
I am a proficient Go programmer but I have this sensation I cannot really describe about that not being enough.
I feel something similar with Zig.
Am I the only one?
I am a proficient Go programmer but I have this sensation I cannot really describe about that not being enough.
I feel something similar with Zig.
Am I the only one?
What I learned is that Rust has by far the best runtime and memory performance, but .NET Native AOT was second best (even better than Go!) and JavaScript was 30x slower than Rust.
But Rust took me probably over 40hrs (hard to say because I worked on it little by little), the learning curve was steep. Its standard library is spare, and selecting the "best" community crate leads to decision fatigue. I banged out the same algorithm in my most proficient language (C#) in an afternoon.
In business, speed to deliver almost always trumps speed of code runtime. Some algorithm hot spots deserve the Rust treatment, but in general, just ship the code to your customers.
That's a long way to say, put some energy into learning Rust sure, but don't beat yourself up about it. It's not a general purpose language like Go or C#. It's a dream for performance critical algorithms.
That said, I would still recommend learning Rust, because it will teach you about lifetimes and aliasing, even if you don't want to learn about them. When building for the web, I think Go's easier dynamic dispatch and GC will save you some headaches though.
I know enough Rust to make myself usable coding in it, however it is mostly for hobby coding.
On my line of work there are zero reasons to move away .NET/JVM/JS stacks, unless driven by customer requirements.
What you're describing is FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out.
One of the things in the IT fashion industry is to learn what to invest right now, what to ignore, and what to keep an eye on for later times.
Thanks!
That said, there is value in learning a strongly typed language. If you like it you might want to introduce concepts in your Go work, if you really like it you will probably want to switch to one, and if not, that's also completely okay, and you'll know what you don't like about it.
For example I like Rust, Scala, TS, but Haskell always makes me cry a bit. Spent many years using Python (py2 to py3 migration was fun), but a few years ago I realized that it's a bad trade off for almost anything I work on, and makes me rage a bit every time I run into super dumb errors, so I avoid that too :)
For me, I see value in learning one systems-level language well to round out my generally higher level language focus.
I never used Go, so choosing Rust for this was easy. Go does not satisfy some tasks in the way that Rust does, but Go likely does just fine for the reasons you originally learned it.
However, I do see Rust as the best way to broaden my horizons and career opportunities. Suddenly, realms where C and C++ would be used exclusively, I can now more easily play in. Many times, Go would not qualify for these types of projects because of its garbage collector.
So from language tooling to browsers, learning Rust may help me debug issues down the stack or help me creatively solve performance issues by plugging it in, and that feels like a win to me and wholly worth the price (or is it pain?) of admission. First class WASM support doesn't hurt either.
Rust is definitely strongest on the system / tooling level, it is what it is built for and what gives the least friction. If you need to use a lot of macros to do your work, you basically throw away most LSP (Intellisense), which can be quite bothersome to work with.
Rust is definitely capable, but writing actual services and such in web rust, takes a lot of work, and isn't as friction-less as building tooling / low level code.
Started picking up Verilog instead... It doesn't risk overlapping in the Go/Rust/C++/C category.
There are so many things I want to learn and do, and so finite attention and lifespan. I'll have to rely on others doing great things with Rust. I'll focus on extracting more value out of the ones I know already.
That being said. We recently build a replacement for Sharepoint because we sort of out-grew it and couldn’t find a decent headless CMS that fit our needs and also complied with the EU legislation for the Energy Sector, and since it had to be actually worth moving away from Sharepoint we actually did some thorough proof of concept testing before other needs basically dictated it needed to be ODATA and thus we ended up building it on C#. Anyway, two of the prototypes were Rust and Go, and I would never use Go professionally again if I could help it. Rust on the other hand seems like it’s genuinely a good language that sees actual real world adoption for major projects. I loved Go by the way, but we kept running into packages and libraries which can basically best be described like this: “Y needed to do X and build a library for it. Two years later Y got a new job and the library was semi-abandoned because nobody else really picked it up”. I know a lot of people are building a lot of things with Go, but we kept having to either reinvent the wheel with it, or to become guy X ourselves. Rust didn’t seem to have these issues, likely because it sees more adoption at more places which have similar requirements that we do.
I’m not convinced I’ll ever see Rust blow up in my part of the world though. Out of all the recent hyped languages going back to Ruby on Rails, however, I think Rust may have the biggest shot at it. But I fully expect Typescript, Java, C# and PHP with some Python to remain dominant for the next 10-30 years outside of the areas where they do C++.
It is the same for me too, almost zero Rust jobs where I live. However, I still benefited greatly from learning Rust, making me a better programmer overall. Now I think more about memory allocations, ownership, how I am passing the data around, and mutability.
Sure, it shouldn't be that way, but I prefer it when we design our systems for the code we write on a Thursday afternoon. You know, those days where you've been up all week because of the baby crying and you've spent too much of the day in meetings that shouldn't even have been an e-mail. Because that's the sort of code someone is going to hate 3 years down the line, and chances are that someone might even be yourself. Unfortunately things seem to be going in the opposite direction with some languages. I didn't work with C# for a while, and I was surprised to see "var" everywhere when I came back to it.
Plus, I already test a lot stuff (not just langs, but frameworks, etc). Learn from many langs that never use for more than their more basics tutorials (like kdb+) just to see what was the deal.
Is like a hobby to me! But mainly, because as solo-dev anything that give me an extra advantage AND is suitable for a the challenges of a solo-dev I wanna know.
So, learning not means "fully committing and betting my work on it". Is pretty certain you will learn very good stuff with Rust that will be valuable to know in general. Could be the same for Zig.
But if it doesn’t, that’s fine too. Go is a great language that works well in many domains. You won’t have trouble finding work in Go for years. It’s unlikely that you’ll have to solve a problem at work that can’t be solved in Go. You’ll be fine. Don’t guilt yourself about it.
If you think Rust doesn't really matter for that and you can even do that with PHP and it's the problem and the execution that matters then focus on building a great product instead of getting into the Hype wagon and missing out on the bigger picture of what really matters.
I don't even code much anymore since I work mostly on platform related issues.
And, BTW, I have a high respect for PHP and what you can achieve with it.
Do you want, in the next 20 years, to have cardiologist that's focused on early retirement, not on the result?
Certainly not a better salary. Beyond that... Rust forces you to care about allocation, deallocation, borrowing, all the low level stuff, while not necessarily being faster.
To me it doesn't feel like Rust beats Typescript or Go as a higher level language at what Typescript is good at, and I don't see why that would change. Some performance critical things to port to WASM maybe...
It may not be a good enough reason to switch, but Rust is nearly always faster than Go. Most of the time orders of magnitude faster.
Between it getting included in Kernel and the whole WASM thing it seems reasonably future safe
Btw, I used to teach jazz guitar for years, I know what you mean :)
Cheers