Should I learn Rust for the next (and probably last) chapter of my developer life ?

105 points demauroy

First I apologize if I post a non-technical question and this is not appropriate.

I am a 45 years-old half-pro / half hobbyist developer: I was an IT engineer by training, and I evolved in my career to more management positions quite quickly, keeping programming as a big side hobby, and something I would also sometimes do at work, typically to write small tools that were required and nobody was doing. I can program some pretty complex stuff (in the last 10 years, I did 2 100k LoC projects, an application server and a 3D video game), but I was never in the kernel / drivers / deep layers of graphical engines part of programming.

I have been programming C when I was young, and I kept a strong nostalgia for the compactness and speed of the language. Then, in the early 2000s, I moved to Java (and recently its brother C#).

Now, I am ready to try something different for my next projects, which may include an online shared spreadsheet (with web and maybe heavy client), and another 3D video game.

I looked around, and I am very interested by Rust, especially as, having gone through a big part of the IT journey since the mid-80s, I am always shocked at how we waste hardware ressources, especially with unoptimized languages, so I like the zero cost abstraction idea.

Now, also, I started reading some tutorial, and I got the feeling there is a very steep learning curve to Rust.

So I have a question for you: do you think, at my age, and never have been a system programmer, it is realistic to learn Rust ? Are there ways for relative beginners to get help ?