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Comment by ultimaweapon | Hacker News Reader

> Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low.

Rust is one of the language I enjoy to use. The problem is you need to overcome its steep learning curve in order to enjoy it, which people tend to give up because it is too hard.

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For me, it wasn’t the learning curve that was the problem with Rust. It’s the compilation time. It’s just so slow. I’m used to OCaml, Go, and Typescript (via Bun or esbuild) with iteration times in the tens-to-low-hundreds of milliseconds. Zig still feels a wee bit slow, but it’s acceptable. Rust? It makes me want to toss my laptop into the fire.

To be honest, I haven’t touched Rust in years, so it may have improved.

It has improved continually over the years, but on the order of 3x-5x, and by the way you talk about it, you’re looking for 10x-100x, so I doubt it’s not still an issue for you.

Coming from those, I can see how it'd be a downgrade. Coming from C++ it's like greased lightning.

Which to me is fine. It's not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language, precisely because of the ease of refactors and speed of development that comes with the type system and borrow checker.

> It's not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language,

I never thought I'd live to see the day when someone would say this. The first 5 years of Rust were all "this is interesting for hobby projects but nobody will ever adopt this in industry".

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