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How I went about learning Rust

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Re: How I went about learning Rust

#41

Post by collaborative »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

I founf myself in your same situation a few months ago. I chose Rust and regret it

Rust is a better c++. It's not appropriate for anything you wouldn't program in c++. The coding speed is slow

So if you are thinking about learning a new language to program your future apps you currently code in node, choose Go

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#42

Post by zozbot234 »

Animats wrote: post #39
indiv0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with extensive experience with Rust and a teensy bit of experience in Go I can tell you that I adore Rust for every use case I’ve tried it out for *except* for network services. It works ok for low level proxies and stuff like that; but Python/Flask-level easy it is not. Meanwhile my experience with Go has been the reverse. I’ve found it acceptable for most use cases, but for network services it really sta…

Yes. Rust is for what you'd otherwise have to write in C++. It's overkill for web services. You have to obsess over who owns what. The compiler will catch memory safety errors, but you still have to resolve them. It's quite possible to paint yourself into a corner and have to go back and redesign something. On the other hand, if you really need to coordinate many CPUs in a complicated way, Rust has decent facilities…

> You have to obsess over who owns what.

Most of the time you can also avoid this by just copying data using .clone(). This adds a tiny bit of overhead, which is why it isn't a default - but it'll still be comparatively very efficient.

Similarly, there are facilities for shared mutation (Cell/RefCell) and for multiple owners extending the lifetime of a single piece of data (Rc/Arc). It's not that hard to assess where those might be needed, even in larger programs.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#43

Post by thejosh »

I tried to pick up Rust a few years ago, but there were too many sharp edges. I thought it was a nice language, but was too early for actual use. I played with some libraries (Apache Arrow, etc) and it was nice.

About 2 months ago I wanted to use Arrow within Elixir, which required me to start using Rust again (Elixir uses Rustler to safely convert from Rust Elixir without theoretically crashing the beam). I am amazed how far it's come, and I've actually been using it a lot over the last few months and haven't ran into any major issues. There is a fair amount of information out there, and the documentation as the OP pointed out is really fantastic.

The libraries are really good now, and I've had no issues using it on Linux or on my Macbook M1. Incredibly impressive speed results. SIMD is a game changer.

Major shoutouts to arrow2 and Polars, I love using it for data analysis :).

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#44

Post by vimwizard »

davidatbu wrote: post #19

I just want to give a shout out to "Rust for Rustaceans". I'm only three chapters in, and it's definitely the most enjoyable technical reading I've ever done because you learn so much, so quickly, and so easily. Steve Klabnik (co-author of "The Rust Programming Language") says it's the book to read after going through "The Rust Programming Language", and I couldn't agree more.

The author fairly regularly live streams on youtube doing more advanced Rust programming, and is responsive to questions coming in.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#45

Post by snoopy_telex »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

I enjoy writing go a lot more then I enjoy rust. Rust is... dense. It's a lot harder for me to read code and understand what it's doing.

That said, I feel that Rust is likely the winner long term. So I'm still building my rust skills, but programming personal stuff in go.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#46

Post by lpapez »

cryptos wrote: post #14
xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

Rust is the more elegant and powerful language. Creating a new language and repeating the "billion dollar mistake" by including null (sailing under the brand name "nil" in Go) is just crazy. Error handling is another strange thing in Go. And generics have been only introduced recently, but there is hardly any support for libraries in it (now). While Go is definitely fast enough for most scenarios, it is not the best…

While Go is definitely fast enough for most scenarios, it is not the best language for low level code like drivers or kernel development.

Go was never ever intended for this purpose.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#48

Post by baby »

indiv0 wrote: post #9
xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

As someone with extensive experience with Rust and a teensy bit of experience in Go I can tell you that I adore Rust for every use case I’ve tried it out for *except* for network services. It works ok for low level proxies and stuff like that; but Python/Flask-level easy it is not. Meanwhile my experience with Go has been the reverse. I’ve found it acceptable for most use cases, but for network services it really sta…

Long time rust/go dev, go is so much faster to write for web services. For the rest rust is pretty nice.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#49

Post by hu3 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #34
nbittich wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think rust is the new haskell. After spending 7 months learning it, I can say I really enjoy the language, but there's no job in it and in my opinion, they take academic decisions that make the language way more complex than it should. Also, the community is toxic. For example, generics in Go were criticized by some, praised by others. You have the feeling that you can freely share your opinion in the go community…

> Also, the community is toxic. How so? I've seen the random drama crop up here and there, but it always seemed to mostly be about the "political" side of things, as opposed to the technical development. What few interactions I've had with library maintainers and the tokio project have always been positive, and the people always seemed helpful.

Comments like this one below are often downvoted without reply just because they criticise rust:

> I founf myself in your same situation a few months ago. I chose Rust and regret it...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32105336

GP puts it well:

> Just like in any sect. As long as you agree everything is perfect, the community is the friendliest indeed.

The community isn't toxic as long as you happen to agree with it and praise Rust... Go figure.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#50

Post by vladvasiliu »

zozbot234 wrote: post #28
xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

Since you're coming from a NodeJS background, you'll want to pick up an introductory textbook about C as well. Rust implicitly relies quite closely on the C machine model, and introductory books about Rust (such as "The Rust Programming Language") don't do a very good job of conveying the nitty-gritty details of that model to novice coders. This is a pretty nasty pitfall when trying to code in Rust, and it's importan…

I second this.

I've learned Rust after having used Python, and at first I had a few "wtf" moments, things I just couldn't understand.

Everything fell into place after discussing these with a friend who knows much more about the "nitty-gritty" than I do.

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