Ask Lemmy

Let me start by saying I love Rust and think it's great. I've been writing some personal stuff in Rust and it's all that I've been looking for.

However there is some stuff you said that makes me think Rust won't be something you would fully appreciate Rust. Firstly every project, regardless of language, when it becomes big it becomes a hassle to maintain, especially if you're not experienced enough to have set up a good architecture from the start.

But more importantly, a lot of Rust benefits are stuff you didn't mention, and some of the stuff you mentioned is not that important.

• Speed: Performance gains will be minimal, most of the time your server takes on an API call is read/write disk/Network, and that takes as long as it takes regardless of language. Sure synthetic benchmark will tell you it's twice the speed for a hello world, but the moment you start relying on outside stuff the line gets murky.
• Less resources: Again, unless you have at least 10 instances of your service or are trying to get it to run in very minimal hardware conditions, you're not likely to see any meaningful improvement. Sure your service now uses half the amount of RAM, but the hardware where you're running it likely has a couple orders of magnitude more RAM than that anyways.
• Garbage collection: You say that like it's a bad word, but at the same time admit to have problems with C/C++, whose main differences are related to that.
• Compilation: I don't think you're taking compilation into consideration, from line change to retest we're talking a couple of minutes depending on the change. That can be annoying really fast, especially if you don't understand the reason. Also, the Rust compiler is EXTREMELY pedantic, it will not let you compile stuff that you think should work because there's an edge case that you've forgotten to consider because it's not something you cared about, e.g. you can't have global mutable variables because that can cause race conditions on multi-threading applications.
• Security: you didn't mention this but it's one of the largest advantages of Rust, things like the Option or Result types as well as the match statements and the borrow checker are amazing and unmatched by anything else out there.
• The Rust price: Rust is not free, you just pay beforehand, you win execution time at the expense of compiling time, you save on runtime errors at the expense of pedantic code checks, etc, etc. Rust is excellent if you understand why, and are willing to pay that price. Rust is for people who when the compiler says "you can't do this because it will cause problems with X edge case" say "of course! Thanks!", if you think "ugh, that's never gonna happen, stupid compiler" then it's not for you. To add to that, Rust can become quite complicated because of it.
• A different way of structuring: Rust does not have classes or any OOP paradigms, it's different from other stuff you've used and requires changes in how you structure your hada and application. Whether that's for the best or not is very personal, but it's definitely different.

Finally I would like to finish up saying that Rust has the most excellent documentation: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ read that, then maybe do these https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings if you get to the error types and are not drooling over the language, it might not be for you.