Rust Is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language
I tried Rust about a month ago. The language itself is amazing, the pattern matching is super expressive, the borrow checker is incredible in the kinds of errors it can pick up on, and rust-analyzer is leagues beyond where RLS was. But... the compile times are an absolute non-starter for me. I&#x27;m the kind of guy that likes to re-run his code continually to see if it validates to what I expect it to be doing. In Rust, this kind of workflow just doesn&#x27;t work at all. The long compile times completely kill any enjoyment or flow that I normally get out of productive programming. Even worse, I found myself anxious to introduce new dependencies, because each new crate would add a few more seconds to the compile time, which immediately correlates to less coding enjoyment.<p>I keep reading in Rust surveys that Rustaceans just don&#x27;t care that much about compile times enough to prioritize improving them. I&#x27;ve often wondered how this can be possible, given that to me it&#x27;s such an obvious glaring issue that all the other cited problems are distant distant seconds at best. I have a theory: there must be two groups of engineers. One group loves fast compile times and quickly validating hypotheses. The other group must value thinking about their code a lot more than running it, and so compile times aren&#x27;t that important. My guess is that, while the second group hangs around and loves Rust, Rust has <i>completely</i> driven away the first group (including myself) to the degree that they don&#x27;t use the language enough to even fill out the surveys.<p>Anyways, I know it has a wide swath of use cases, mostly in systems programming. I&#x27;m just bummed that if I ever do any of them, I won&#x27;t really enjoy it. :-(<p>[EDIT:] Gotta go to sleep, it&#x27;s far too late here. I really appreciate all the thoughtful replies. Rust&#x27;s amazing community is another reason it annoys me that I can&#x27;t fully get into the language as I&#x27;d like to.