Looking to what to learn in 2018? Learn Rust!
Before I tell you why you should learn Rust, I want to tell you the story of why I chose Rust over some other languages:
At the end of 2017, I was struggling myself thinking on what other language should I learn, I though inJava or .NET, because you know, they are some of the popular ones, but I didn’t felt that passion or that love, so I started to googling; I read good stuff about Erlang so I decided to give it a try. Nice language, but it has the same limitation that Java and JS has, it requires a virtual machine in order to work, I mean, if you want to share your Java Code, then that person should have at least the JVM in order to execute it, if you want to share your JS code, then he will need Node (In case you use Babel, modules, etc. which I think you do) and if you want to share your Erlang code, you need to have its own virtual machine, almost all the languages requires some how a virtual machine in order to be executables.
After all my frustration, because I got frustrated, I though Erlang was the chossen one but it didn’t, I remebered that Mozilla were working on his own language so I give it a chance and I must tell you, so far I like it! I will tell you why in 3 points, I just needed 3 points to chose Rust:
1. Compile it once and run it everywhere
A you read it, Rust will compile everything to C so if you’re using Windows, you will hace a .exe and if you’re using a Linux based OS, you will have a bash file, as easy as that, you just take your executable and execute it somewhere else, you don’t need a virtual machine to run it, you just need C and everything has C support.
2. WebAssembly Support
I came from the Web Development world so this is why this is important to me, I can create my entire project using rust and then instead of compile it as an executable, I can compile it to WASM.
I’ve been trying to work with WASM but I’m not that good at C++, so once I read that rust gives support to WASM I got excited, because Rust is friendier than C++.
3. Node Native Extensions Support
Another nice feature of Rust is the support for Node native extensions, yes, you can use Rust instead of C++ in order to create Node native extensions, with the same performance as if you were using C++ but friendlier
Summary
For sure there must be some other points you may like Rust, I just told you the ones I needed, give it a try and see if you like it as I do, it has great features that I wanted I have in JS. Besides you can do great stuff with Rust, since a Web server to a complete Web Page and I’m just talking about the Web World, imagine what you can do with Rust!
As you noticed this wasn’t the regular post I write, but I wanted to share with you my experience with Rust and what you can do if you came from the Web world as I do, thanks for reading and share it with your firends if you like it :)
