Ask HN: Is it worth investing in learning Rust?

To answer your question, it would be good if you indicated what your experience is already and what you want to do!

Just my opinion (given my own experience and goals; if your experience/goals are different the below may be irrelevant):

As a constant waverer, my answer to the "Go or Rust" question was, after much time, "no".

Instead I'm returning to C++ and trying to learn how to use modern C++ idioms and finding this very productive.

It's a bit frustrating, as C++ is a bloated mess of a language with way too many dark corners, but good discipline can allow you to use a version of it that is really nice. As someone who learned C++ in 1992 (when much of the language wasn't even really there yet) and has only fitfully engaged with good C++ practices over the years, the payoff from learning new parts of C++ has been really much better than a new language.

Plus, neither Rust nor Go are particularly mind-expanding if you're a native C++ speaker (as compared to Python, Prolog, Forth, assembly, Haskell, Lisp, ...).

What are your goals? Are you trying to find a job, get into some sub-field of development? Do you have some particular thing you want to build? Or just satisfy some personal itches?

It is worth learning about it, the biggest part of the learning curve is learning how to right programs better using the language guidelines. I use it daily and it has been a wonderful tool in the toolbox to improve performance, reliability and security of our systems and low level processing systems. You will more then likely still need to use C and C++, but learning Rust will help you program better in C and C++ along with other languages as Rust can call those C and C++ based programs.

The use of Rust is rising, especially for new systems level projects or rewrites of older programs. This is especially true where unexpected issue reduction is a high priority (high frequency trading systems, industrial systems, security systems, video transcoding, packet switching and routing systems, video monitoring systems, virtualization and emulation, web servers, other embedded etc.)

I would recommend getting started learning Rust by having a few projects. I would recommend starting off by building a multi-threaded web server. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second-edition/ch20-01-single... See how many concurrent clients it can handle and make adjustments to increase it's max capacity. After you have done that I recommend building your own daemon to handle log parsing and analysis from your web server to give you a nice table of stats. To spice thinks up I would recommend trying to do this without the dependency on external resources after you have downloaded all the resources you need: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/source-replacement... https://crates.io/crates/crates-mirror then try to build the projects.

You can also do some much needed checks on your programs input by using Valgrind and several other tools. Once you are satisfied with your program insure you use Rusts tools to also build the documentation and check your coverage: https://github.com/huonw/travis-cargo

> That said, IMHO, Go to me feels more like a replacement for Node more than a replacement for C.

Except the first release of node was May 2009 and the first announcement of golang November 2009. Node was also first showcased in November 2009.

So for me golang cannot be seen as a replacement for node just from chronological order. Also their design goals at the time seems very different.

Go is a much, much easier language to learn; it's one of the easier mainstream languages to learn.

If you really have to ask, like it's a headscratcher between the two, learn Go first and see if you're happy where you land with it. Go is the more popular of the two languages; there's not much "risk" to either of them, but there's marginally less risk for Go.

Rust is the more ambitious of the two.