Submitted by twovests in programming
I was enthusiastic about Rust when I heard about it in 2016, compared favorably with Ada.
I didn't think about it much, but then did my first hello world in 2018. Then I used it for a class in 2019, and then another in 2021.
Then I used Cargo for the first time near the end of 2021 and my head exploded all the way open. You mean to tell me that I installed a package by building from source, and it took one command?
Pretty quickly, I came to favor Rust utilities, because they were usually the easiest thing to install. No dependency issues! No fuss! Just cargo install whatever! None of the issues I get with apt, no I don't want to use npm and nvm, fuck snaps all the way to hell, I don't want the suicidal ideation that comes with pip, and I can't believe Mac users actually put up with brew.
But, after I got comfortable using cargo install, I eventually started actually writing Rust. As it turns out, it's fantastically expressive. I don't know what a trait is and I will never write a macro, but the expression-oriented nature and the pattern matching as a first-class control flow is really, really good. I feel like this is what functional people love.
But the real kicker? I'm actually productive in it. Even though I have 10 years of Python experience, 3 years of JavaScript, ~4 years of using C/C++/Java in university, etc., I've still been practically unable to contribute to open source projects. I've contributed to two in 15 years...
... Except for Rust, I've contributed to five Rust projects so far, and I've hacked on local forks for many more. It's just that convenient.
I'm told Go has similarly good tooling. If that's true, I would feel more confident about contributing to a project using Go (a language I have written maybe ~100 lines in) than I would contributing to a project using Python (a language I have written probably ~10000 lines in).
I was really hoping I'd be disillusioned about something by now, but I keep using Rust and I keep appreciating about how nice it is. Maybe a hot new language will come out and it'll improve things that I didn't even know were annoying me about Rust.
Shouldn't I think Rust sucks by now? I'm told that my excitement is just hype. Well, I'm going to keep working on Rust projects. GIMP has been a few months from 3.0 for about twelve years now, I wonder if it's because nobody knows how to build it...
At least other languages being bad means good job security for me.
flabberghaster wrote
The one thing i find hard about rust is that most of the programs I write for my day to day use are things that basically just call linux system calls, or use popular C libraries, things that C++ is extremely good at. Or they're things that are trivial to do in python.
So as much as I like Rust, I don't actually know how to perform a sha256sum on a file and then set an xattr for it (without shelling out or downloading a random crate).
It's little things like that that keep it from being my go-to, but it's really good and I want to use it more.