Why I become Rustaceans (Rust programming fans)?
When Rust first appear in 2015, a lot of folks said that Rust was hard to understand, which I totally agree. But after taking a course “Solving Modern Programming Problems with Rust (COMP 6991)” at UNSW, my opinion has been changed. I become a part of Rust community already. This blog will explain you why I strongly recommend you to start learning about Rust programming:
No more pain with unexpected behavior
I used to pain from dealing with unknown behavior from C programming. This happens because C doesn’t have a good error handling like Rust, such as Result/Option pattern, to spot code issues before compiling the entire program.
Steep learning, but efficient in long term
Start learning C++ might seem easier than diving into Rust. But, you’ll find out that Rust lets you work more efficiency in the long run. This is because Rust has a structure that shape the way to solve the problem which preventing the bugs or memory safety issues that slow us down.
Memory safety is mandatory
According to memory safety, buffer overflows is one of the most dangerous issue in C/C++ that many developer has to deal with. Rust, on the other hand, was built with memory safety perspective. Ownership model in Rust make the project much safer than C/C++.
A Real-Life Example
To give you a concrete example, “Why Rust? It’s the Safe Choice.” by Eric Seppanen is an excellent example. Eric explains that choosing Rust leads to better products because Rust doesn’t slow you down from garbage collection or interpreted bytecode. Moreover, there is no runtime overhead because Rust’s memory and thread-safety protections concept.
He explained in his blog that his undergraduate intern last summer decided to rewrite the visualizer section of a project in Rust. This not only made it run faster but also made it simpler to improve. As a result, engineers could add new features to help spot and fix bugs more effectively.
Rust might look intimidating at first time, but give it a chance, and you might just find it’s the perfect tool for building faster, safer, and more reliable software.
