What do you like about Rust?

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I’ve seen more and more people get into Rust recently, so thought it would be cool to have a thread for people to share what they like about it :nerd_face:

Its portal has also just gone up :+1:

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One thing I really like that some other people dislike is that there are no implicit conversions between datastructures. I like it a lot because implicit conversions have bitten me many times while writing C/C++.

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I’m a big Rust fan! My favourite features are:

  • It compiles to native
  • It’s really fast
  • It has excellent tooling
  • The type system makes refactoring really easy
  • The error messages are precise and contain a lot of detail
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Entirely agree. Automatic conversions just means things can convert in unexpected ways. Actual calls are more reliable, especially for maintainability.

And yep, all of this.

The big thing is the Ownership Validation, it just outright removes entire classes of bugs from even having a chance of happening in safe Rust code! In addition it helps enforce a ‘one true way’ for writing fast code. The slower the code runs the longer it tends to be. The shortest way tends to be the fastest because of that.

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And the ecosystem is not only big, it’s also of a very high quality.

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That’s really because the language encourages it. It’s hard to write bad code in rust, it’s larger and uglier and harder to follow then the way to write fast code (which is so backwards from ‘most’ languages where the short way is often not the most efficient way). Plus combined with the built-in documentation system means that almost every library has really high quality documentation. And repeat that for tests too!

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I’m new to Rust, and so far I like the concept of Ownership and Borrowing more than anything else.

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Just came across this article:

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/rust-programming-language-seven-reasons-why-you-should-learn-it-in-2019/

As far as the experience of writing Rust, I’d say it feels like a mix of Ruby, Haskell, and Scala. It has functional influences such as closures and iterators, and a rich type system similar to Haskell.

Nice to see there’s some Ruby influence in there :nerd_face:

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