I am not hating on Rust. I am honestly looking for reasons why I should learn and use Rust. Currently, I am a Go developer. I havenāt touched any other language for years, except JavaScript for occasional front end work and other languages for OSS contributions.
After working with almost every mainstream language over the years and flitting between them on a whim, I have fallen in love with Go. It feels like āhomeā to me - itās comfortable and I enjoy working with it and I have little motivation to use anything else. I rage every time I get stuck working with JavaScript because dependency management is pure hell when dealing with the intersection of packages and browsers - by contrast, dependency management is a breeze with Go modules. Iāll grant that it can suck when using private packages, but I everything I work on is open.
Rust is intriguing. Controlling the lifecycle of variables in detail appeals to me. I donāt mind garbage collectors but Rustās approach seems far more elegant. The main issue for me is the syntax, specifically generic types, traits, and lifetimes. It looks just about as bad as C++'s template system, minus the latterās awful compiler errors. After working almost exclusively with Go for years, reading it seems unnecessarily demanding. And IMO the only thing more important than readability is whether it works.
Why should I learn and use rust?
P.S.: I donāt care about political stuff like āBecause Google sucksā. I see no evidence that Google is controlling the project. And Iām not interested in āBecause Go sucksā opinions - it should be obvious that I disagree.
idk if youve heard but its memory safe
Iād have to be living under a particularly large rock to be unaware of that. āItās memory safeā isnāt that big of a deal to me. Even building concurrent systems, memory safety has never been a significant issue for me with Go.
i think go is also considered memory safe due to the garbage collector
Go is memory safe due to its garbage collection. Which adds a decent overhead generally.
Rusts memory safety is enforced at compile time and therefore has zero cost at runtime.
For a system level language this can be really important.
In my book, āmemory safetyā also means avoiding data races. AFAIK Rust prevents most or all races by enforcing ownership and lifetime of pointers.