> I'm not quite willing to dismiss Rust merely for being hard to learn, but after poking around in both Go and Rust for a few weeks, I feel like I could build a project in Go (slowly, and with a lot of googling), but I don't feel like I could build anything in Rust without a lot more learning.
I can totally relate to this: I spent almost a year reading blog posts about Rust or comments on /r/rust, between the first time I read the Rust book and the time I fell confident enough to write m'y first Rust software (a cli tool).
In the meantime I learned Go in three days and I was able to work with it.
Why did I continued to learn Rust your may ask ?
Comming from web languages, learning Rust was a pilgrimage. I learned so much about low level computer sciences: what is memory locality, what's a data race, how does a memory allocator work, what is inlining, etc. It was definetly worth the time I spend on it.
And now that I'm proefficient with both Rust and Go, I can tell I prefer Rust by a large margin. Rust is a really well designed language, with a really nice community and a decision process designed to improve the language with feature real people need. Whereas Go is a monolyth controlled by its creators built around the dogma of symplicity at all cost, and they usually reject users proposal for improvements.
Besides the politics, Rust is way more expressive and going back to Go is always boring because of the boilerplate. It's also way easier to shoot yourself in the foot in Go than in Rust, by ignoring error, misusing a shared variable (forgetting to use a lock, or using it improperly) or dereferencing a null pointer.
In short IMHO Rust is more difficult to learn than Go, but you learn more and when mastered, the language is more helpful.
To all of you strugling learning Rust: carry on, it's worth it ! And also, don't wait and go on #rust-beginners [1] on IRC[2], it's really helpful.
I can totally relate to this: I spent almost a year reading blog posts about Rust or comments on /r/rust, between the first time I read the Rust book and the time I fell confident enough to write m'y first Rust software (a cli tool).
In the meantime I learned Go in three days and I was able to work with it.
Why did I continued to learn Rust your may ask ?
Comming from web languages, learning Rust was a pilgrimage. I learned so much about low level computer sciences: what is memory locality, what's a data race, how does a memory allocator work, what is inlining, etc. It was definetly worth the time I spend on it.
And now that I'm proefficient with both Rust and Go, I can tell I prefer Rust by a large margin. Rust is a really well designed language, with a really nice community and a decision process designed to improve the language with feature real people need. Whereas Go is a monolyth controlled by its creators built around the dogma of symplicity at all cost, and they usually reject users proposal for improvements.
Besides the politics, Rust is way more expressive and going back to Go is always boring because of the boilerplate. It's also way easier to shoot yourself in the foot in Go than in Rust, by ignoring error, misusing a shared variable (forgetting to use a lock, or using it improperly) or dereferencing a null pointer.
In short IMHO Rust is more difficult to learn than Go, but you learn more and when mastered, the language is more helpful.
To all of you strugling learning Rust: carry on, it's worth it ! And also, don't wait and go on #rust-beginners [1] on IRC[2], it's really helpful.
[1] from a web browser: https://client00.chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mozilla.org%3A%...
[2] irc.mozilla.org