Right now Go seems to be on an upward trajectory, and despite its ugliness and how primitive it is, it is the job which can pays off when hunting for jobs.
For example, I didn’t have any idea how to do parallelism and concurrency correctly in C++ until using them in Haskell and porting the ideas back over. Same goes for a lot of techniques that were easier to learn in other languages and translate over, like writing parsers, implementing constraint solvers, enforcing complex invariants with types, &c.
I see Golang replacing Java longterm and Rust replacing C/C++ (yeah, even C) due to the memory safety and preciseness + speed it offers. It may never be truly C speed, but from where I stand the tradeoff is worth it (and when it becomes NOT worth it, rust/c interop is SUPER easy).
While I like Rust a lot, I think it's definitely not the language to learn if you want a job right now. If you want a job right now, go learn Java. Unfortunately, depending on the company you go into, you can basically throw away the next X years of your life working with uninsteresting/stagnant codebases, unmotivated peers, and clueless management -- OR you'll find companies that are using Java in a progressive way.
If you want to invest in a language that will likely become a big player in the next 10 years, and is soundly written, maintained and progressed in the open, then commit to rust.
Also a sidenote, most good managers/engineers realize that syntax doesn't actually really matter. Good engineers get up to speed in languages they've never used in days/weeks -- if you know the paradigms, and how to design good programs, it's a matter of just changing what you type.
Knowing X language isn't what makes a good developer, it's knowing some sufficiently multi-paradigm langauge X well enough that you've moved past the basics and started re-discovering paradigms, design patterns, and answers to problems in a few problem domains.
To me, the possibility of Rust replacing C is the most interesting aspect of the language.
(I'm not sure I see it replacing C++, but maybe competing with it; choose between evolution or revolution!)
The general hype around Rust is fascinating to me though. I assume it's mostly driven by former C/C++ programmers, but the process has been noisy enough to attract attention from the general developer community? If anyone wanted a non-GC language, C++ has been here since forever and is still being worked on. But Rust has somehow made non-GC seem cool?
> It may never be truly C speed, but from where I stand the tradeoff is worth it
I'm a Rust newbie and haven't benchmarked anything, but the sense I get from the docs is that it theoretically can be as fast depending on how much you limit yourself. Kinda like how C++ can be as fast as C, if written with care.
It would be great to see a write-up comparing Rust and C overhead, e.g. cpu/memory overhead of function calls, slices, etc.
True enough as far as it goes. But in practical terms, as platforms have multiplied in number and increased in surface area, being a useful and/or marketable developer means in-depth knowledge of specific platforms. It's much harder to spin up quickly on a platform than a mere language. However well you know java, you're not going to be a useful Android programmer without a decent understanding of the gamut of Activities, Fragments, dexing, etc. Cocoa is far more the key to iOS development than is Swift (or Objective-C). Go/Javascript/Java (etc) knowledge doesn't get you more 1/10th of the way to productivity with AWS.
All this is making it increasingly difficult to be a convincing generalist.
And to go even more off topic. I thought the go hype was kind of dying down?
To write Rust you have to be very conscious of how you're sharing data between functions, structs, and threads. This is a common source of bugs even in GC languages, so working with a compiler that will point out your mistakes teaches you how to avoid such issues in other, less prescriptive languages.
I also think rust is a lot of fun! I haven't had a chance to use it professionally yet, and it doesn't seem to have made much impact in industry yet, but I think it will get there. Right now it's pretty hard to write networked services (the main market for Go it seems), but that will get a lot better this year as libraries mature and async/await is stabilized.
If you're not yet 'secure' (no-one ever really is, but you know what I mean), then, you'd probably be better off learning something more immediately bankable, and coming back to Rust later.
Though there's no rule. An early-stage developer might have a passion/aptitude for Rust, and the resources to work hard learning it, contributing to open-source, pitching themselves at companies they've researched and like the look of, etc.
If you are, then it doesn't matter. Learn a new thing and try it out.
The value of a language is not defined by how experience with it looks on a resume. If that is your only concern, of course you won't find Rust worthwhile (yet).
Rust is a language that cares a lot about correctness. If I were particularly interested in making sure the code I wrote worked in production, Rust would be my first choice in the set of a dozen languages I know.
Rust is probably quite a bit faster than whatever you're using for web development. The normal counterpoint to this is that web requests tend to be rate limited by the database. This is mostly true but using Rust pretty much guarantees this will be the case. I believe that this point isn't that compelling with current architectures but would be worthwhile in a CQRS architecture where formatted data gets pushed/cached by the web servers and servicing requests stays on-machine.
Rust is one of the more compelling web assembly languages due to not needing a garbage collector. Demos exist but this is mostly in the exploratory stages.
Longer term, I expect Rust to have a unified async networking stack. You can do blocking IO networking in Rust but I expect most network clients/servers to be mostly async once the Tokio stack settles. This is all expected in node but the networking libraries tend to be fractured in most languages.
I don't think you should run out and switch over to Rust for general web development. There's going to be a big release in the fall that rolls up a bunch of ergonomic/convenience stuff that should make it easier to pick up and less annoying to use. I also think that IDE support will be important for a lot of people learning Rust. The situation is improving but the support is not up to par compared to more mature languages. All told, it's serviceable but I don't expect it to be particularly compelling as a web development language for at least another year or two.
I have no excuse for not being the one to make it (outside of not at all knowing Rust well enough) but I selfishly wish someone would.
My problem wasn't that good documentation wasn't available, it certainly is. The first and second editions of the rust book rust book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book) are what I read through and they're great.
What I meant was very literal -- I don't know of a site with Go tour's exact (or close to exact) interface, where you can run through ~30/40 slides (that's how long go tour is AFAIK) and write some code right in the browser to get a feel for the language.
Rust is considerably more complex than Go, so I'm not sure it could be so succint, but I can say that at least for me, going through Go Tour really did make me feel more confident in starting a project with Golang.
