[mcronce]

> rust also incurs a non-negligible ongoing productivity cost for its complexity

This isn't really consistent with my experience. Compared to writing other languages with varying levels of strictness (C, Python, Go to name a few), Rust's compiler saves me a lot of time writing tests and finding bugs.

It doesn't save me the work of fixing them, but in my experience, bugs that are hard to find and easy to fix drastically outnumber bugs that are easy to find and hard to fix.

That said, I haven't tried Zig. It's on my radar, but just haven't had a new project to start lately.

[sryie]

I am surprised that you don't encounter a productivity cost in rust vs languages with a gc (like python and go). If that were typical then I assume everyone would be using it. What do you consider to be the tradeoffs between rust and other languages? What are its drawbacks in your experience? How much rust experience do you have compared to other languages?

[noodledoodletwo]

The productivity cost is mostly up front, once you understand borrowing it's seriously not bad in 99% of cases. Also, you can be initially productive in C or C++, but how much time goes into trying to fix undefined behavior, threading issues,etc. More importantly, when do those hours get spent? Is it after a customer is screaming into your support chatbot, or is it before you launch during normal development? To me that's the difference and the killer feature. That's why ms, aws, etc are using it. Not because it's new and marginally/debatably better then c/c++.

Once I started realizing what the borrow checker was saying it wasn't "fighting the compiler" I realized what I was asking the compiler to do was really not a good idea. It becomes your friend basically.

I didn't make this post to shill rust, I'm pretty language agnostic to my own detriment... The point is, it's worth considering and trying it again if you didn't get it the first time around. Rust took me 2x to become a tool I'd use, I honestly hated it at first.

[sryie]

I think we can agree that c and c++ are essentially table stakes at this point and that anything new needs to offer strong incentives.

I like rust (I actually liked it from the start years ago). However, I believe that there are tradeoffs and the companies you named use other languages in addition to rust because they also believe there are tradeoffs.

Rust won't be the last language. I don't want to get too comfortable with what I know and miss out on what I don't. I am excited by new languages that may also have something to offer. However, I can't master them all so a good discussion is valuable and can offer shortcuts through the noise. I think my assumption in my first reply to your original post was that you were interested in the same thing. However, if you are happy with rust then I don't want to spoil your enjoyment.