It was a real struggle, and I wasn’t enjoying it at all. “Programming Savant” is a great way to put it because all the people I know who like Rust also happen to be the smartest engineers. In the end I gave up because I wasn’t getting any value. I was also trying to find a Rails equivalent, tried Actix and I didn’t like that either.
From my limited experience I think it is possible to write simple, dumb Rust, still get a N times performance benefit using N times less resources compared the languages you listed at the cost of being more verbose.
There's a learning curve to understanding concepts like lifetimes and so on. But diving deeper there arise many problems. There are just a ton of hyper specific and nuanced types and traits in Rust, and that's just the std lib. Reading Rust is also quite difficult because it takes time to navigate the types and abstractions. Also dependency trees seem to be deep in OS projects.
It's a powerful, great language, but I would say the learning curve and the subtleties can _easily_ be underestimated, because there is an initial AHA moment when lifetimes, traits, closures, async etc. start to click. But the devil is in the details.
But I think the need/want for safe, fast languages with good security defaults is on a steady rise, especially in web development. Clients (laymen) start to notice and praise good performance and robustness more than they did 10y in my experience, so it's definitely worth it to take a look at languages at Rust.
Reduced to its barebones, the problem is:
1. Expose a HTTP server
2. Make n HTTP requests
3. Combine their output
4. Return the result
But I was definitely expecting to have an outcome in a few hours. This might be a language that it takes more than that time for me to be proficient enough to use async code in.
Here's an example from my friend, almost exactly my problem and what was suggested: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/kvnq36/does_anyone_kn...
In typical TypeScript/Python, you don't need to worry about memory allocation. At all.
If you're writing any non-trivial Rust application, you're quickly going to have to learn a lot of concepts regarding memory, and your code will reflect that.
Now, if your application must be high-performance then Rust is a no-brainer. Rust is much better than the alternative (probably C++). But, most web applications don't need to be high-performance, and it would be better to use a language that is easier to learn and write.
Even my peers that transitioned from ruby to rust had a pretty smooth time since ruby's functional-ish, enumerable dependence, and blocks style coding lends itself well to rust's idioms.
But if you've only ever stayed in iterative dynamic language land and don't remember university coursework on programming languages, compilers, or operating systems, yes, you'll probably be in for a world of pain and frustration.
Rust is much lower-level than Ruby, so in general you're going to be a lot more concerned about memory -- in this case, satisfying the borrow checker, dealing with stack vs heap allocation, etc.
> the finished product is as easy to work on as our Ruby code
I... highly doubt this. It's harder to hire Rust programmers than it is Ruby programmers. It's harder to teach Rust than it is Ruby. And, again, your Rust code is going to be much more in the weeds than Ruby would be. Rust also is a pretty complex language -- there are a lot of concepts to learn if you want to use it well. Ruby is fairly easy to learn.
I'm not saying that Rust isn't the right language for you, or that Rust is bad (I love Rust!), I'm just saying that it's much lower level than Ruby, and that comes with tradeoffs.
I wish people didnt say or think things like this. a lot of the times people get into these complex things and talk over people to make them selves look smart. or make things look more complicated then they really are to improve their image. i ran into this a lot when dealing with rust. if you can't do complex things in a clear and simple way, your just regular.
