Member Avatar for DeanMSands3

tl;dr: Rust looks fun, but it'll take me a while to learn it. Do you think it's worth my time?

So... Rust. As in Mozilla Rust. You know, the one that's not Go, but still wants to be hip and young.

A little disclaimer: From years of firmware brainwashing, I tend to like the "lower" high-level languages like C. Consequently, I find C++ sexy and exotic. Not everyone does, and I get that.

Back to Rust. It looks interesting in terms of execution speed: . Speed is nice.

The language itself looks alright. I don't do much functional programming, but this seems like a reasonable introduction/refresher-course.

Can't say much for the job market, but who knows what the future holds? (I went to school with a guy who landed a position just for knowing Oz/Mozart b/c what the hell is Oz/Mozart?)

So... I haven't committed myself to taking the plunge just yet. Anyone have any thoughts or experiences they'd like to share?

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Rust is a systems-oriented language that aims to give C/C++ levels of control and performance while preventing whole classes of memory bugs with an ownership/borrowing model instead of a garbage collector. For someone with a firmware/C background like , that combination often feels natural: low-level access plus stronger compile-time safety and safer concurrency.

A practical learning path is to follow The Rust Programming Language (the “Book”), then work through the interactive exercises in rustlings and quick tests on play.rust-lang.org. Cargo is the canonical build/tooling system and dependency manager, so early familiarity with Cargo pays off. A tiny example that shows move semantics (and why the borrow checker exists) is instructive:

fn takes_ownership(s: String) {
    println!("{}", s);
}

fn main() {
    let s = String::from("firmware");
    takes_ownership(s); // s moved; cannot be used after
}

Tooling and ecosystem are strengths: formatting and linting (rustfmt, Clippy), testing (cargo test), the package registry (crates.io), and decent debugger/IDE integration make development productive. For embedded/firmware work, the no_std story and resources from the Rust Embedded community enable incremental adoption and interoperating with existing C via FFI.

As suggested, a short hands-on experiment is the best gauge. A weekend with the Book and a small port or CLI tool will quickly reveal if the ownership model and workflow click. If the primary aim is immediate hiring, local job-market checks are sensible; for systems-focused developers who value safety without sacrificing control, Rust is a solid skill to add.

Member Avatar for Dani

I've certainly never heard of it, but I've barely touched anything beyond PHP since starting DaniWeb. That being said, if it interests you, then give it a whirl and see what you think. If it's enjoyable to write in, then delve further. As far as the job market ... I'm not so sure there's a need for half the languages that are out there nowadays, but who am I to say ;)

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