[Multicomp]

Is now the time to start learning rust? In your estimation, are there going to be lots of job opportunities for people who have 15 years experience with rust?

I primarily live in the .Net world, but rust seems extremely close to f# in terms of compiler safety, and I'm trying to decide what programming language to learn next.

[afandian]

I learned it a few years ago, just for fun. I have it in my back pocket for a personal project. The language has some odd corners to learn (and they are what make it special), but it's not so difficult you can't forget about it for a year and then come back to your project, as I have.

There's some highly specialist aspects you _could_ learn (like anything I suppose), but I've got enough to get by and be as productive as I'd like without needing to get to that level.

So there's no harm in learning enough to get by for fun.

Compare to e.g. Haskell, which I learned at university, I have a memory that you'd have to invest quite heavily to make it do something useful.

[doteka]

My job is about 50% Rust, 40% Typescript, 10% Python with regards to language.

I would say Rust is the best day to day experience out of these 3 except for glitchy editor tooling and the long compile times. We have 1000 line services that take close to 10 minutes for a release build which is not ideal.

I would not necessarily suggest learning Rust to get a job though. We mostly stopped mentioning it in our job ads because we don’t want people applying for the “hip stack”. Usually, competent programmers with some basic understanding of how manual memory management works have no trouble picking it up as they go.

[mlindner]

> We mostly stopped mentioning it in our job ads because we don’t want people applying for the “hip stack”.

Can you elaborate on that? I'm maybe thinking of changing jobs soon and my #1 want is that I can commonly program in Rust as opposed to C. Why would you explicitly avoid mentioning Rust?

[doteka]

Yeah, sure. What I have seen a lot when hiring, is "magpie developers". These guys always have the hippest CV - if it's on the HN front page regularly, you bet it's on there.

We found in practice, these people tend not to be the best additions to a team. They are mostly interested in the new thing, and only for so long as it is new. When something new comes along, that's what they want to flock to. They'll be an endless source of rewrite suggestions, but tend to struggle when they need to actually dive in and solve complex problems with these tools.

In contrast, we are not really using Rust because it's the new thing on the block. We are using it because we write complex software that needs to run fast for the business to be viable, and Rust's got the best tradeoffs for that right now. If Rust wasn't a thing, we'd likely be using C++.

[doteka]

Also, a word of advice: the language in use should be one of the last things you're considering when looking for jobs. It really doesn't make a difference in your day-to-day happiness.

Instead, try to look for a team you fit in with, a manager you can trust, growth opportunities, and the chance to work on interesting projects that have impact. Case in point, one of my most enjoyable (and beneficial to my career) jobs was mostly Java 8 - and that's certainly near the bottom of my "good programming languages" list.

[athriren]

This is all very good advice.

[lllr_finger]

Now is a great time to learn it, because there's nothing huge on the horizon that will make your life easier or harder.

I started learning just as the async/await and futures features started causing churn and confusion in the ecosystem - it was slightly irritating at the time, but in hindsight, I'm still glad I started learning then.

[WilliamEdward]

Plenty of big name companies (discord, amazon) and even universities (georgia tech) are using and teaching rust. That's enough for me to say you should jump on the train.

[ellw]

Another example would be Dropbox which quite recently published this great blog article about "Rewriting the heart of our sync engine" in Rust [1].

[1] https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

[lhdj]

I started a company while also learning Rust. It seemed like the right choice given that we needed something which emphasized memory safety and was also blazingly quick, but I was essentially forced onto it while dealing with the pressure of having to deliver on tight deadlines.

Our core tech is in pure Rust and I have to admit that coming from Javaland it's refreshing to deeply trust your code. It's hard to convey this idea of 'if it compiles it works' but I no longer worry about showing off prototypes to people. If they compile they work.

There is a learning curve as you are introduced to new ideas and design patterns but it's worth it! Rust has made me a better programmer.