Things I hate about Rust, redux
This reads like praising by faint criticism.<p>The number one problem Rust has now is that it’s overall not significantly better than C++ and sometimes the reverse is true. I’ve learned for example quite a good chunk of Rust, implemented a project (actually a rewrite from C++) and now I’ve mostly reverted to C++ and Go. The only reason that I’d use Rust is if I had to <i>ensure</i> that a program is memory safe (e.g. it’s planned to be handed over to developers unexperienced with C++, it will be heavily changed in the near future, etc).<p>It’s no coincidence that I’ve only learned a chunk of Rust - I skipped async, concurrency and parts of the standard library which I didn’t need. The language and the ecosystem are big and complex, very comparable to the complexity of C++. It’s in a different difficulty league compared to C or Go and I wouldn’t say that it’s hard per se to learn, as the concepts themselves are similar to C++, but there’s a lot to study, remember and categorize and map in relation to how things are done in e.g. C++. One exception is Rust’s equivalent to C++ template-heavy code which is simply not worth wasting one’s life on. Whoever writes that is either a library developer or an asshat.<p>Compile times are too long and what makes it worse is that everything seems to be distributed as source and has to be compiled. Because cargo is so convenient to use, dependencies are completely out of control: adding a single crate can end up pulling in dozens of dependencies. In my case I ended up with ~150 for ~5 crates!<p>All in all the benefits barely outweigh the costs for me, especially since I know C++ well. Rust to me is a language for large-scale or low-level projects that need solid performance and provable memory safety, but it’s overkill for many things where one can use Go or a simplified dialect of C++.