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Comment by bfrog | Hacker News Reader

I find that Rust is like maybe 1.5-2x more productive to code in than say C or C++. Part of that is the tooling has so much less arcane baggage, part of that is that I need to reach less for external tools for metaprogramming, part of that is fewer crazy macro/template compiler errors, and part of that is less time spent debugging.

It all adds up.

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I've heard very inconsistent things about this, which is interesting. Often people say Rust is less productive, as there's often "makework" involved with satisfying the borrow checker. I suspect a lot of it revolves around how you perceive that sort of thing: it can be cast as both productivity (satisfying it can potentially rule out bugs) or a loss of productivity (you were already satisfied the code was correct).

But I don't have enough experience with Rust to really have formed an opinion on that yet.

There is definitely a hump to get over (maybe you are never fully as "productive" as languages that just let you shoot yourself in the foot, I say as a full-time Go developer for a few years now). Simple, straightforward code is often harder to write. Don't even get me started on stuff that uses async.

But IMO it's very worth it. What do you get out of wrestling with the unholy, fractured C/C++ ecosystem? The privilege of being able to _use other people's code_. You get that without much hassle in Rust.

I'm about 2 years into primarily writing Rust (after a long time in the .NET world).

The borrow checker slowed me down a lot at the start but these days it's not a big deal. Eventually you internalize the easiest ways to make it happy (clone and pass references as needed) and can reserve tricky optimizations for hot paths where they actually matter.

I would say that today, most of the times I sit down to write some Rust I'm nearly as productive as in higher-level languages... but then ~20% of the time I get bogged down in complicated type signature stuff (especially with async code, ugh) and it's a time suck.

Right, its maybe just a little less productive than something like Java because you do have to work out types a bit more and think about memory a bit more. The end benefit tends to be though that... your code compiles, and it just works. So maybe a little more time up front, for, potentially, less time down the road debugging.

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