Ask HN: Should I learn Rust or Go?
I’ve been doing mainly JS and TS the last few years and picked up Rust because I wanted to build a video editor. It worked out, the product is launched (used Tauri which is also nice) and I’d choose Rust again, even despite the initial pain.<p>The basics weren’t too hard, but I definitely felt the learning curve! I used C and C++ professionally my first few years out of school, and in some senses Rust felt like coming home - thinking about memory again, references vs values, the short naming conventions… but in other ways (lol borrowing) it was a very different thing. Rust was the first language I learned in recent years where I couldn’t just cobble things together once I knew the basic syntax. The ownership system was at the heart of that, and I kept doing things that went against the grain and made the compiler unhappy.<p>Having come out the other side though, I’m really happy with Rust. It’s fast, and the safety aspect is awesome because I can be pretty sure that as long as I avoid .unwrap()ing things, the program isn’t going to crash. There’s none of the “null or undefined” anxiety like with JS.<p>It’s also interesting to see the difference in the communities. I really like how performance is a first-class citizen in Rust! A lot of libraries have benchmarks. People go out of their way to avoid allocating memory. Maybe overkill in some spots for sure, but it’s a stark contrast to the JS world where I often get the sense that talking about performance will attract cries of “premature optimization!”<p>For learning I used the official Rust Book initially, then Programming Rust (the O’Reilly one) to get another explanation of some things, and then Rust for Rustaceans - which was great but way over my head at the time and I should probably revisit it again.<p>I would say learning Rust needs a very hands-on approach. It wasn’t, at least for me, the kind of language where I could read a book and then go write Rust. It took practice and failure and mental shifts that I don’t think would’ve happened if I was reading or watching videos.<p>Good luck with whatever you choose and happy 4th!