[atoav]

As someone who came mostly from Python and some C: I must say the most difficult part was stopping myself from forcing aesthetical ideas of how to structure code from the other languages into Rust.

There are three points here:

- Rust lends itself to certain structures (that you might not be used to) and makes others very harder to pull off (that you might be used to). The trick is not try to do the latter when the former is perfectly fine. E.g. me trying to do object oriented programming in Rust, or starting off with a linked list as a C programmer

- Rust can be written on different levels. For example you can go for "perfect" code in terms of performance and dive into things deep or you can just not bother at all and do the totally naive thing and still end up with quite fast programs most of the time

- Rust has a type system that it strictly enforces. This makes some things harder, others simpler. Make sure to be aware what you can do with a type system and why it can be a good thing to have one.

[beezlewax]

As a javascript/typescript developer I took a notion to learn Rust and it has been hard but rewarding on a personal level. Im concerned though that I'm learning somwthing that has very few if any real jobs right now. All I see is block chain nonsense. In your opinion is there much chance that this will change?

[atoav]

To be honest I would say Rust is worth learning even if you were to never use the language at all after learning it.

The problems Rust attempts to tackle are fundamental problems you will encounter in many languages. Understanding how to program or how to think in order not to get those problems in the first place is the thing Rust can teach you. A lesson that any programmer can learn from.

That being said Rust has great testability and interopability. I myself use Rust in some (work) projects in conjunction with Python.

So I definitly see some future for the language, also commercially. But even if I wouldn't, I would still recommend learning it.

[beezlewax]

Interesting take. So far I agree with what you're saying. It has given me more insight into how memory management works than I'd had before. I think one of the things that bugs me about javascript is how difficult it is to track down memory leaks. A problem I've often faced when dealing with large codebases and other peoples code. The memory management in Rust via the borrow checker is a very elegant as a solution. It's also a pain but not as hard to deal with as people make out.

[k__]

"the most difficult part was stopping myself from forcing aesthetical ideas of how to structure code from the other languages"

Coming from C and PHP to JavaScript gave me similar cognitive dissonance.

Syntactically these languages are very similar, but the semantics require to rethink quite much if what I learned.

[galangalalgol]

Yeah, I wish there was a good list of things to hint you aren't being rusty. When you are cloning everything or have arc on everything that is a pretty good hint, but I'm sure someone could put together a better list than I could.

[tialaramex]

Clippy can help you to write more idiomatic Rust, so if you aren't already, definitely check out the clippy lints for a working program you wrote:

  cargo clippy

Clippy won't tend to spot unnecessary Arcs and similar architectural mistakes, however it would notice if you act as though things aren't Copy when they are [e.g. you've probably never 100.clone() but if you did Clippy would point out that's just 100 and the same would apply to types where it's less obvious that they're Copy and you might have forgotten]

[galangalalgol]

Yeah clippy is amazing, but I was thinking things everyone has to do sometimes in rust, but that if you find yourself having to resort to them often might be a hint that your overall paradigm might need a tweak to fit well. I didn't mean unnecessary arcs, but rather necessary ones. I find that if I donthings the way Ferris wants me to, that I dont have arc, rc, refcell, or clone very often, and nothing ends up needing to derive copy. When Ferris is happy my life is easier.