Last time, I wrote about frustrations in trying to motivate myself to learn ocaml. I could see the strong points but given that I've been using Clojure now for a while, it didn't really hold any value added for me in my current situation.

Next, I thought I'd explore Rust. On the non-functional style, my go to languages have always been Python for scripting and small things and C professionally. I also used and taught C++ and Java. I always loved C's minimalism but it was pretty bare bones and Java and C++ while more modern both also have their warts so it made sense to see if there was a language I'd like to use instead of any of those three.

A number of years ago, I decided to explore Go for this. Go had some nice features. It didn't do a full blown object oriented thing but rather a more lightweight way of defining structures and binding functionality to structures. I guess like interfaces. Since I'm not a big OOP person but did like the occasional object abstraction this was great. I also loved goroutines for concurrency. On the other hand, I didn't like the lack of functional goodness so ultimately I stopped pursuing Go.

This time, it was Rust's turn. Here's a list of a few of the things that drew me to Rust:

• Good learning resources
• Good dev experience under Emacs
• Static typing
• immutable by default
• Supports the other functional goodness that I like

I just started playing and so far I like it. In addition to the above I'm also seeing some other positives. It has pattern matching which I mentioned in my previous post and the object model looks more like Go than like C++ or Java so that's a plus.

Another big potential positive is Rust's concept of ownership. An informal way of thinking about it is that it's how Rust deifnes what can access memory. In Rust, if you have code like this (lifted from the Rust Book):

    let s1 = String::from("hello");
    let s2 = s1;

    println!("{}, world!", s1);

you'll get an error. Once you assign s1 to s2 then s2 owns the memory with the string "hello" so when you try to access it, you get an error. Of course, Rust has ways of dealing with this including explicitly declared mutability and references and maybe other things I haven't gotten to yet so it isn't really a problem. I can also see it as being a really strong way of encouraging the writing of safe programs.

I'm pretty early on in the journey - I though I might try Advent of code this year in Rust but I don't think I'll be sufficiently up to speed on it yet but we'll see. In any event, it seems to be a very cool language and a strong C++ or Java alternative.

A strong alternative at least in terms of using. For teaching, that's another story. For me, learning hasn't been a problem since I've been around the block a few times but I could see the language being a challenge for beginners. Lot's of cognitive overhead for the ownership thing as well as general scope rules and the way mutability works. I think all these features are great for the language but I suspect that it wouldn't fly very well in a CS0 course.

So, I'm feeling that Rust's a go and I look forward to continuing to explore the language. If you want to check it out, start here: https://www.rust-lang.org/.