[voidhorse]

Personally, I'd recommend learning C to learn about the basics of memory management in higher level languages in general. It is simpler than Rust and is very transparent, making it easier to grok the concepts before moving on to something like the borrow checker, further more, it will actually make the motivations for the borrow checker and what it does to help clear. Same goes for other memory management solutions, gc, reference counting, etc. So much of what we do is still bound to a deeply entrenched model that C established.

Ultimately we are all still just writing nicer versions of C. The fundamental model of pretty much all high level languages remains the same. You can still explain and think about the vast majority of memory related goings-on in a program as using the basic abstraction of the pointer and contiguous arrays of bytes. Even languages that have different paradigms, be they functional, logical, or object oriented can be described in terms of pointers--one easy way to understand pretty much every other programming language paradigm is basically just to ask "how would I implement this using pointers?". It's a shared history and approach to computing we have yet to move on from.

[warabe]

I started learning some Rust, just begging of this yeae, and I am starting to think learning C might be the shortest path to fully understand the motivation of ownership model.

But at the same time, I don't want to invest so much time into learning a language which I probably am not going to use.

I am probably being disrespectful. I understand a lot of people use C, including Linux kernel devs, but I cannot imagine developing new apps with an old language such as C.

[voidhorse]

Not wanting to invest time makes sense, but I think you'll definitely get return on investment by learning C. It's doesn't end with rust. Learning C's approach to memory will give you a much better understanding of pretty much all object oriented and imperative languages and give you a better understanding about how memory might be used under the hood in higher level languages in general.

It won't take you too long either! Compared to modern languages, C is very small and very simple and likely won't take as long as learning any other popular language in use today. You can learn all of C in the amount of time it takes most people to learn just the basics of a borrow checker. If you only focus on the aspects related to memory (stack, heap, sizing, arrays, pointers) it would likely only take half a day, if that.

[warabe]

Yeah, haste makes waste. I will give it a shot! Thanks for the tips!

[lozenge]

Are you not interested in contributing to existing projects like Postgres, CPython... or being able to use the many libraries with C APIs?

[warabe]

Well, that sounds exciting, but I am a novice programmer from data science field. So, I am more like a user, rather than a developer.

Contributing to world class projects such as Postgres sounds cool, but doesn't it take years of experience?

Of course there are other benefit of learning C as you noted.

[DarkNova6]

I second this 100%. In the first semester of my CS degree we were only programming in C and it helped so much to understand the basics of memory. Heap, Stack, Pointers are crucial mental models which help you in nearly all programming languages.

If you are responsible for your own memory, it makes you more aware of issues such as indirection and cyclic dependencies.

[Georgelemental]

This is the path I took, and recommend. The borrow checker and Rust's restrictions are easier to understand once you have experienced doing it manually. And the basics of C89 don't take that long to learn!