I work for a company mostly using Java, but I choose to rewrite a preformance critical part of the system in Rust. Before this rewrite I had only written some smaller thing in Rust, so i was familiar with the language, but not very experienced.
When I did the re-write I expected the performance increase, I was also impressed by the concurrency and the safety around that. It is of course still possible to deadlock, but most other issues around concurrency just goes away. I found that rust really lives up to the credo "fearless concurrency". However, all of these things were expected.
One of the things I had a hard time adjusting to was all this Error handling that was required, and getting used to the ? operator, learning to use the thiserror crate. I initially thought that this was the weak point of Rust. After a while I learned to use it and realized that it was quite the opposite. When I learned how to do the error handling, I suddenly found that the result is that there are no surprise errors left in production.
The unexpected benefit I saw was that the logfiles have shrunk with a factor 100 from Java to Rust. In java there are so many things that might go wrong in so many ways, that you need to log the internal state all over the place to be able to understand why something blew up. In the rust version, I get a clean and handled error in my log stating exactly what went wrong. Being forced to handle errors, combined with great mechanisms to do it, is a under appreciated side of Rust.
What is your most surprising benefit of using Rust?
As a sysadmin I always assumed having a log file that contains at least one backtrace in the last 60s was somehow required for the JVM to work. Certainly seems that way when running e.g. Jenkins or other "off-the-shelf" Java software.
Yes, Java lives by the credo "Backtrace or it didn't happen!"
The annoying part to me is usually that they often only print a backtrace but not the actually relevant information, e.g. if a file was not found at that point in the code it would usually be nice to know the filename or if some permission was denied, permission for who to do what (to which object(s)).
This is the reason you need to log the application state all of the time, to get context to the backtrace.
As someone who's written a lot of Java software over the years... this makes me sad to read.