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How I went about learning Rust

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51–60 of 303 posts

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#51
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…

There was a relevant discussion here just a little while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31976407

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#52
A bit unrelated:

Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression that the people who learn Rust, tend to be quite experienced programmers. I have yet to see complete beginners document their journey, starting with Rust.

I've seen lots of people do that with C/C++, Java, and the other usual suspects - but Rust still seems like a language for at least intermediate programmers.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#54
post #25

“How” is the stupidest word to auto-censor. Removing it completely changes the meaning of titles. It makes articles seem vapid or banal when they wouldn’t otherwise, and vice versa.

In this case, it changes the title so much that it's not correct English anymore.

An exclamation at the end would fix this, but yeah, I'm of the opinion that censoring the 'How' didn't distract from the article until I saw this thread.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the community is toxic. The Rust community has been the friendliest PL community I've seen so far.

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

Nope, many times I submitted a question, got help instantly with a very long explanation telling why the thing I try to do makes sense and should work, but some things in the compiler or libraries haven't been stabilized or finished yet, and they were working on that. And then giving me some temporary workarounds.

The community definitely acknowledges the limitations and sharp edges and listens to the users. Thanks to that attitude, Rust is way more friendly and easier to use than it was 5 years ago.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#56

A bit unrelated: Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression that the people who learn Rust, tend to be quite experienced programmers. I have yet to see complete beginners document their journey, starting with Rust. I've seen lots of people do that with C/C++, Java, and the other usual suspects - but Rust still seems like a language for at least intermediate programmers.

[deleted]

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#57
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 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.

I think "somewhat dogmatic" would be a more accurate description of the Rust community, IMO.

For example, I recently had a discussion about `enum` being a poor choice for what Rust makes it to mean from a C/C++ developer's point of view (which are Rust's main "replacement target" languages). The closest I got someone to agreeing with me is a sentiment along these lines "well, `variant` would may have been a better choice but it's not very familiar to C/C++ developers and, besides, when this decision was made, Rust had a hard limit of 5 characters on keyword length".

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#58

A bit unrelated: Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the impression that the people who learn Rust, tend to be quite experienced programmers. I have yet to see complete beginners document their journey, starting with Rust. I've seen lots of people do that with C/C++, Java, and the other usual suspects - but Rust still seems like a language for at least intermediate programmers.

It's a very new language (NLL, a key feature in Rust ergonomics, was introduced in late 2018) and people are yet to figure out how to teach it to complete novices. Existing introductions assume that you do have some programming experience.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#59
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 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…

> there's no job in [Rust]

As of today, indeed.com lists 1,500 remote jobs mentioning Rust vs. 4,018 jobs mentioning Golang. That's not so bad. (However, there's no way to tell how many of those listings are Rust-specific as opposed to polyglot job descriptions.)

> Also, the [Rust] community is toxic.

Speaking slightly humorously, if you think Rust community is toxic, try expressing your dissatisfaction with Swift or Apple in the fanboi Swift community (controlled by Apple employees) and see what happens to you :).

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#60
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…

What are you looking for in the 2 languages? Here are some of my thoughts: Golang * Development speed: Golang wins by far. It's closer to Python in that regard, but with strong typing. * Very nice multi-threading via Go routines and channels. Impressive semantics in simple syntax, requiring no synchronization mechanism on the user side. * Large garbage collector penalty. Rust * Complete language with build system, cr…

> slow to compile

In my experience it's the slowest language to compile ever, and the binaries generated are gargantuan.

I was super excited to learn Rust, but that excitement is now 100% gone.

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