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Ask HN: Is Rust too complex for mere mortals?

by alexkon on 7/26/17, 1:09 PM with 5 comments

C++ is notorious for often being too hard to get your code completely right. Is Rust affected by the same curse?

Did you work on a Rust project in a team with ordinary, non-genius programmers? How does the expressive power and complexity of the language affect the quality of their code?

I want to understand how demanding Rust is to developers compared to C++, C, and Go.

  • by jfaucett on 7/26/17, 3:48 PM

    In my limited experience, Rust is actually easy - after about 2 weeks give or take a bit - of programmers hating the compiler and the rigidness of the language. Then they've got used to most of the ways to make the compiler happy and its easy sailing. Of course my sample size is like 5 people so I could easily be way off here.

  • by foodie_ on 7/26/17, 3:52 PM

    This question has come up a few times, so you can search to get other opinions.

    My own is rust can be conquered with enough patience and time, but because of the high entry costs it will always remain a niche language.

    I've written C and C++ professionally, also used Go and Rust on hobby projects. Rust, by far, was the hardest to learn and get something useable out of it. Because of that, I would never recommend someone put it into production unless they have a very specific use case that Go could not handle. The onboarding costs would be just too much.

    I do like the concepts behind it, and thought it would be the answer to Go's limitations in expressiveness.

    I do still hold out hope for it though. I think with the right tooling and development environment it could one day become useable, just like Java and C++ benefited.

  • by johnpython on 7/27/17, 2:39 AM

    Unless you have a valid need to write low-level code (something you would have done in C or C++), choosing Rust for your next project will destroy the productivity of your team.