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You will probably get a lot of varied responses and also some people who just defend the language of their choice. Let me give you my opinion who just started learning 3 weeks ago. And I needed around 1 week until I could write a simple parser by hand and around 2 more until I am now being quite productive in this new language. It is actually very simple go get into, depending on your experience. What do mean by 'threshold for beginners', what are beginners for you. Do you mean someone learning their first programming language or someone already proficient with one or multiple trying to learn Rust now? Because a lot of the features of Rust are present in other language and your mental models will be similar enough for them in Rust accelerating your learning curve. Of course someone new to programming will have problems as the features that are unique to rust (borrow, move) in addition to everything else leads to a lot of overhead sure. My experience is with Java, Python and Javascript/Typescript as I know them sufficiently well to create programs and I also dabbled with many other languages just trying out how they feel (Scheme, Racket, Nim, Go, Haskell, C, C++, Ruby, Smalltalk).
When starting with Rust it took very little time to get comfortable. The language feels very well designed and Option, Result type are very logical to use for return types. Many languages have these so depending with what you are familiar with this might be new to you but it is surely not more complicated than explaining try/catch blocks. Of course dealing with Option/Result is a bit uncomfortable in the beginning but If you just browse a bit through the standard library and learn about the `?` operator you see many patterns how to deal with them in an efficient manner (map, map_or_else, or, or_else, flatten, unwrap, unwrap_or,...).
Rust has closures but now you find them in almost any language so it is not really surprising (maybe only nuances that come up with the borrow checker).
Most of the standard traits and enums are quite straightforward such as `Default`, `From`, `FromStr`, `Iterator`, `Clone`, `PartialEq`, all the operator traits. Also the borrow checker and some lifetime compiler errors are for sure a thing that can lead to thresholds and for my time spent with the language I would say there are many things I will need to learn to fully be able to grok the language. However, most of the time you can circumvent these problems by just not using lifetimes in your own code and by cloning variables. So for people that want to write really efficient code you can do this without cloning variables if you have a better understanding of them but as a beginner you have a simple escape hatch most of the time and allows you to gradually gain a better model of lifetimes/borrowing rules. I think the only really threshold is the trait object problem. If you want to build any kind of nested structure or if you want some kind of "polymorphism" which is a natural reaction depending which programming language you have used. You will need to deal with understanding them and this might take some time. |