[vlovich123]

Go yes. Rust? I wouldn’t say that Rust is easier although I may be biased with my long C/C++ background. The ownership model is a pretty complex thing to learn. I guess maybe if you Box a lot?

It does have an easier on-ramp story for getting started/adding dependencies and that may be important for getting started.

[nicoburns]

> The ownership model is a pretty complex thing to learn

It is, but if you want to write C or C++ that doesn't crash, or just silently work incorrectly then you have to internalise these rules anyway. And having a compiler that gives you a helpful error message when you get it wrong is much easier than getting a segfault at runtime that may not even occur in a proximate part of the code. Let me put it this way: in 5 years of using Rust I am yet to need a debugger, and only need even println debugging rarely.

[vlovich123]

That’s not strictly true IMO. There are things that are trivially expressible in C++ that require a lot of complexity on the Rust side to prove to the compiler the code is safe.

I don’t disagree with you on the safety aspects* and 100% real production code should really be starting in Rust. From a learning perspective though… not as sold yet. There’s a lot of things nicer (the stdlib is 100x better and more ergonomic and more pythonic in terms of “batteries included”). There’s a different set of edges though and none of the ownership concepts you learn really transfer anywhere else so you’re learning Rust’isms but not general systems programming things (just like goroutines teach you Go’isms and not what high performance thread safety means).

* The debugger claim feels specious because segfaults aren’t the only source of bugs that need debugging. How do you deal with an unexpected panic or logic bugs?

[lenkite]

As someone who properly learned C++ only some years ago, I can confidently state that Rust is harder to learn than C++. You can effectively code in C++ by learning only 20% of the language, but Rust has a far larger mental overhead to start coding. You have to do everything "The Rust Special Sauce Way".

[mamcx]

> I wouldn’t say that Rust is easier

Rust is easier than C/C++, but not at first. After you learn the semantics of it, is very smooth sailing (at least until you get into the most exotic needs like build your own async runtime).

[nicoburns]

I mean perhaps if you’re writing 20 line toy programs, but to do anything non-trivial in either language you’re going to want to use a library, and that’s already hard in C++