Two Years of Rust

a year ago

The author reflects on their experience working with Rust for two years on a B2B SaaS backend.
Rust is described as a 'better Go, or a faster Python', highlighting its speed, static typing, and great tooling.
Performance in Rust is praised for its high ceiling, allowing optimizations without hitting language-imposed limits.
Cargo, Rust's build system and package manager, is lauded for its declarative nature and excellent developer experience.
Rust's type safety and error handling are highlighted as strengths, reducing the need for extensive testing.
The borrow checker is discussed as a challenging but ultimately beneficial feature for memory safety and concurrency.
Async programming in Rust is defended as a necessary complexity for high-performance network services.
Refactoring in Rust is straightforward due to the compiler's helpful error messages.
Hiring Rust developers is seen as easier due to the language attracting curious and skilled programmers.
The author expresses a positive emotional response to working with Rust, contrasting it with the anxiety of Python.
Criticisms include the module system's complexity and slow build times, attributed to Rust's design choices.
Mocking in Rust is described as cumbersome due to the language's lifetime and trait system.
The expressive power of Rust's proc macros and traits is noted as a double-edged sword, capable of creating complex, hard-to-debug code.

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