6 months of Rust
Whilst I have dabbled in Rust for several years, I have now been writing Rust full-time for just over 6 months. My experience has been excellent. Like those before me, I've endured the learning curve which is ownership, the borrow checker, etc, but it never seemed terrible. I suspect I started at an opportune time, with a combination of factors helping alleviate some of that:
- mature tools, IDE (JetBrains), cargo clippy, compiler help messages, and
- build times are tolerable with an M1.
I have been writing software since I was 15 (30 years 🤯), and have written meaningful and maintained applications in C, C++, Pascal (Turbo Pascal 5.5), Visual Basic, Visual Basic.NET, Delphi, C#, Objective-C, Swift, Go, x86, 6502, ARM (32), Python and PHP across numerous platforms. I regularly read assembly, and enjoy a low-level understanding of how code is generated and executes. The Rust ecosystem, not just the language, is what I've been waiting for. The welcoming community is also a huge bonus.
Some features I appreciate (besides the obvious safety and performance ones):
- cargo
- one of the best package managers I’ve used
- rustup
- running multiple tool chains and versions has never been easier!
- configuration
- being able to override which tool chain a directory should use, tune build settings, etc
- build scripts (build.rs)
- specifically, I’ve been playing with binding to some C/C++ libraries, and
bindgenmakes that a pretty good experience
- specifically, I’ve been playing with binding to some C/C++ libraries, and
- it’s an expression language
I have always been curious how Rust has been the most loved programming language on Stack Overflow for so many consecutive years. I can see myself checking that “most loved programming language” checkbox for the next SO survey.