[josephg]

Right. But you can fumble through writing a lot of (maybe subtly wrong) C code. I certainly did for many years. You can't fumble through writing Rust. Its an order of magnitude more difficult to learn because the compiler won't compile "bad" code. Unlike C all the pain happens up front.

Rust hurts when you're learning it. C hurts when you're trying to debug your program.

If you've never written low level code before, I wouldn't start with rust. Zig or C are both much better options when getting started. But learning rust eventually will make you a better programmer.

[estebank]

I'm not sure I agree: the biggest pain point of Rust is that it makes some common patterns from C and C++ non-representable (outside of unsafe). People coming from other languages will likely encounter patterns they are used to that are cumbersome but still representable, with a judicious use of Box, Arc, RwLock, and friends. This means that someone that wants to "just" get something working can implement the same things they were used to, just with a nagging reminder that "they are not being as efficient as they could be" (which annoys a certain kind of people, a category I belong to too). And from this I believe that people that start learning programming with Rust will have a hard time understanding the reason for a lot of its rules, but will not have a hard time following and relying on them. I am convinced that the people with the worst Rust learning experience are experienced low level developers, looking for high performance, that have been experts for so long that they have forgotten what "learning something new" feels like.

With all that said, there are lots of things that Rust could do to make itself easier to learn. I believe it will get there, in time.