An average programmer's (me) reason to invest in Rust

Hello everyone, I am Sumit, writing this from a small village in the Himalayas. I have been learning Rust for a couple years now and I still have much to learn. I am a senior software engineer and have been in the engineering leader role multiple times. I have mostly worked in early stage startups all my professional life of 15 years.

I have started and stopped learning Rust multiple times in the past. But it has become my daily language only since 2023. I am a product first engineer and also a founder (multiple product attempts). I consider myself an average programmer and Rust seemed quite daunting, does so even now, but less often.

I have worked with Python (moving from PHP) since 2011, JavaScript and PHP since 2006. I started working with TypeScript from around 2018 and also started using type hints in Python. Even though I am a product first founder type person, I really enjoy writing code. I create passion projects like, Dwata, GitPlay (both open source) and am now re-writing Dwata as a desktop app.

How Rust has been a great tool are some of these points:

• Forces me to think of the structure of data in my projects
• Makes me feel confident about the code I write
• Allows me to peek into the underlying libraries (unlike Python/C, JavaScript/C boundaries, which also exist in Rust but tons of high-performance stuff is pure Rust)
• Almost everything is typed, so libraries have very similar underlying patterns
• Writing desktop apps feels a lot more confident in Rust considering the app goes to any user and is not directly serviceable by me in case of issues

The other selling points like great tooling, package management are awesome but for me, it primarily boils to be being able to create applications and distribute them with confidence. I have always been in the self-hosting and desktop apps side of things instead of SaaS (Software as a Service). I have always wanted to build products for impact, reach and empowering people with daily business. Not just enterprises with deep pockets. Desktop apps feel very fitting for this.

Like I said before, I consider my an average programmer and more a product/founder person. I code daily and I am really starting to feel the benefit of the time/energy I have invested till now. Go might have been the language, but I somehow liked Rust more when I was trying both. Not a language expert to clearly state why.

I hope this helps anyone else in a similar bucket who fears Rust but is still intrigued.