this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
145 points (92.9% liked)
Programming
17439 readers
214 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm just a modder and primarily use C, but started with BASIC and then C++; I am curious, without knowing anything other than the name and it's apparent growing popularity: What makes Rust so appealing? And if I was interested in trying to learn Python again, would it be better to just learn Rust instead?
Rust has a lot going for it beyond just the safety thing: excellent package manager, powerful trait system and generics, helpful compiler errors.
The whole language is designed to help you avoid making the programming mistakes people tend to make, not just the borrow checker and memory safety.
I guess I kind of see it like this: I wouldn't touch C or C++ without a 10-ft pole. Rust is my 10-ft pole.
That being said, I think python occupies a very different space from rust and allows for super rapid prototyping so I wouldn't conflate the two
It feels like the last language one will need to learn.
It has an improved C-style syntax (if statement is similar to if expression), it has algebraic type system (enums can contain nested data) and 99.9% of the time you can write in safe mode where you are guaranteed not to segfault.
Rust is the only language with the same low-level memory model of C/C++ (no garbage collector, focus on zero cost abstractions, etc) while also being memory-safe (like nearly all popular modern languages besides C/C++). Before Rust, you often had to choose between memory safety and performance.