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Comment by meatjuice | Hacker News Reader

> the pool of engineers with C++ background is much larger than the pool of Rust developers

Well that's pointless.

I'd wager that any highly qualified C++ engineer worth working with can pick up Rust and become a highly qualified Rust engineer in <6 months working in it full time.

And honestly, I'd rather work with those people than with people who came to Rust from languages like Python, Java, TypeScript, etc.

Yeah, I've seen C++ engineers pick up Rust in a few weeks. And one JavaScript engineer, too, defying my prejudice :)

I picked up Rust in a few days/weeks, but ... I'd say not totally idiomatically. It actually takes a while to really learn the ins-and-outs of the right way to express certain patterns.

If the codebase that the eng is being brought into is established with good conventions, I could see it happening quickly though.

I've seen engineers with prior C++ background and barely any knowledge of Rust brought in to work on a well established and large Rust codebase with coding guidelines and the such, and they were rocking in less than a month.

Why? The place I work at decided to use typescript for their integration testing framework for some reason. Everything else is c++ and python, and the developers they hire all know c++ and python, but not typescript. As a result, the integration test framework is a dumpster fire.

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