[skohan]

I think it's a little bit of a trap to fall into to believe that since Rust:

1. provides some unique benefits in terms of safety, and

2. is hard to program and requires rigor

that all that rigor is "worth it", and that it makes you a better programmer to put up with it.

Don't get me wrong, Rust's tradeoffs are valuable for some use-cases, but there are many, many use-cases where a GC'd language will work just fine, and it doesn't make you less professional for choosing a higher level tool which you can be more productive in if you don't have performance or memory constraints.

I also think, as the author alludes to, that many programmers get their first exposure to algebraic types and the elimination of NPE's through Rust, and get the false impression that the benefits of these features are somehow related to the additional complexity required by Rust. But these features are not related. Languages like Swift have shown us that you can get many of the benefits of Rust in terms of providing an "if it compiles it works" experience without many of the challenges Rust imposes on the programmer.

[mnd999]

Completely, I don’t see rust as a replacement for Scala, Java, Go (and especially) Javascript which tend to be what I use at work. It’s certainly possible, but I don’t think it would add much.