Ask HN: Will Rust become a good career choice?

[wideareanetwork]

I’d love to be a full time rust developer.

Rust is very hard to learn and time consuming too.

And there’s very few rust jobs out there.

So I wonder if investing my time in learning rust will eventually lead to a career in a world in which rust is commonplace.

Or is learning rust just a difficult to learn hobby?

[gregjor]

Programming languages are not the foundation of a developer career. Languages come and go. Few non-trivial applications use a single language.

Rather than mastering this or that language and try to predict the future, focus on solving business problems, adding value, implementing requirements in code, and good development practices.

If you want to learn one language that has a high chance of lasting throughout your career, learn SQL or C.

[tcbasche]

I second this; languages and frameworks come and go and you definitely do not want to be left behind. What’s more important is learning how to learn, so you can pick up any language (“tool”) that comes your way.

[iLemming]

> learn SQL or C.

And Lisp. Any Lisp. Clojure, Racket, Fennel, Janet, CL, Elisp.

[randomopining]

What about Java?

[iLemming]

Not Java. JVM. Many often confuse them. People dislike Java (not without merits), and because of that, they'd naturally dismiss JVM as a viable technological choice. JVM, as a matter of fact, is a pretty cool piece of technology. Learning the fundamentals of JVM and its internals is a good career investment without a doubt. And you don't really need to be a Java expert to build things to run on JVM.

[ahel]

Do you have any good link/books for learning about JVM?

I found that there are tons of beginner java, but nothing on JVM.

I've only found by Scott Oaks Java Performance, which gives some interesting knowledge about JVM but it's a secondary focus.

[gaws]

> learn SQL AND C.

FTFY. Both will last our lifetimes.

[TechBro8615]

What’s good for your career is being passionate about your craft and continuing to learn. Writing rust is one example of doing that.

I do see a lot of new startups using Rust and it’s becoming more common in server side environments. It’s probably worth learning.

[quietthrow]

Say a Uber driver asked you if driving a Honda sedan was good for his driving career. What would you say to him.

Or if you prefer a more historical analogy it’s like a free mason saying is using one particular brand of construction materials good for his career. What would you say to him.

Don’t forget we software engineers are just modern day free masons.

Whether rust becomes a good choice or not is based directly on what you learned from using it and not just developing with it. A goog Career is based knowledge and or experience compounding. When you start with that in mind the language doesn’t matter as much as the learning. Language is just a tool at that point. Sure knowing how to use multiple tools is good. But that kind of differentiator will only get you so far.

Good luck!

[hkarthik]

My view is that Rust is pretty much where Go was about 3-4 years ago. About to see a lot of strong adoption and emerge as a pre-eminent language for writing backends. Strong library support and first class tooling is probably the only thing holding it back, but I'm hearing of more and more companies starting to use it. So it's definitely going to be a good bet to learn it.

Best way to learn Rust is going to be finding a way to get it into your current job. Write a small CLI tool in Rust, or spin up a small service in Rust. Make sure it's not on the critical path so that even if you're the only one who knows it, nothing horribly bad will happen. Ideally, see if you can get a coworker to learn it with you and contribute so multiple people know it. This helps engineering managers/directors get more comfortable with adopting a new language and tech. This might have to happen in your spare time initially, but hopefully if you're successful at it, you can start to use Rust at work and get the credibility you're looking for.

[childintime]

I went looking for a job one year ago, and I critically analyzed if I should position myself towards a future with Rust. That resulted in a note to self: a revolution it will be, and I have to add my 2ct, sooner rather than later.

Rust and the electric vehicle are totally comparable and will follow the same adoption curve at about the same time. That much has already been decided. In about 2 years time the transition will be in obvious to everyone. This is a decision driven by industry, managers and $hit, not developers.

Electric cars offer a superior ride, no maintenance, no pollution and often drive themselves. And so does Rust, uniquely. Aware industry must be, or extinction threatens. That reality is 5 years out, and is part of "software" finally coming of age.

We'll leave the diapers, and the crap that software is full of, behind. It'll not be just Rust, but Rust uniquely. Meaning that this change reinforces Rust's moral leadership.

[kettunen]

Big reason why industry have chosen C or C++ in these safety critical applications is the fact they are standardized and their caveats are well known. Two years is definitely too short time for Rust to become something so stable that it could be utilized in these fields.

I personally would definitely want to see the shift towards Rust but theres no way around the fact it'll take time. When we have something similar to the lines of MISRA or AUTOSAR in Rust then it might be an option, but those kinds of endeavours will take a long time. But I definitely can see some usage for Rust already in many other domains!

[gaws]

Your response is confusing. Should OP invest in Rust now or not?

[afarrell]

OP should extract insights from this thread, thoughtfully reflect on their experience, and decide for themselves.

[maltalex]

I was in the exact same position and ended up giving up on Rust due to the opportunity cost despite having spent considerable time on reading the book and writing some toy code.

The way I see it, there's an infinite amount of things you can learn, and you have to optimize for whatever gives the most bang for your buck. That buck being time spent.

Rust is very intriguing, but that alone wasn't enough for me to keep devoting time into learning and continuously brushing up on it. Spending time on fundamentals and languages and tools which I have a daily use for gave me a better return on investment.

[throwaway81523]

No idea about the commercial prospects but if you haven't used any modern statically typed languages yet (Haskell, Rust, Scala, maybe ML/OCaML, or some of the more pointy headed ones like Coq) then I think getting some understanding of these is an important part of your tool set, even if you don't use it at work. They used to say the same thing about Lisp and it's still true.

I've spent a fair amount of time on Haskell and it's been worth it even though I haven't ever directly used it at work for anything significant. Rust at worst seems the same way.

[poletopole]

I think people have an exaggerated expectation about Rust even though it's good at what it does. But if you really want to do low level development, then learn C first along with a good OS theory book and perhaps a compiler engineering and networking book. Those are the three areas (except for embedded programming) that Rust is being used right now.

[obayesshelton]

A developer is an architect of solving problems.

The language is the material / tool used to solve the problem in question.

As we learn we know when to use X tool or language to solve Y problem.

[dave_sid]

I think it’s on the way out tbh.

[gaws]

Really? What's your argument?