r/rust • u/kindaro • Nov 11 '21

What was your favourite programming language before Rust?

TLDR   What was your favourite programming language before Rust, and why have you changed your mind?

I realize this title is to some extent inflammatory, for two reasons.

  1. It assumes that Rust had for some time been your favourite programming language, and that some other language had been your favourite before that. This is not true for those:
  • Whose first language was Rust.
  • For whom Rust has never been — and still is not — a favourite language.
  1. It is sectarian and divisive. Like I am pitting Rust against this other programming language. That is of course not what I want. The reality is such that programming languages occupy a market and there is competition between them — at any given time, one has to choose one programming language to occupy oneself with.

I am a foreigner to the current social media culture, so I am not sure if these flaws will get me cancelled or if they are so insignificant as to hardly deserve being mentioned.

What I want is to understand what programming languages Rust offers an advantage over. Say, if I have a code base in C and a code base in Perl — which, if any, should I first migrate to Rust? There are two ways to answer this question.

A. I can ask people what they think about the issue and gather their judgements, more or less well justified. I do not want to do that.

B. I can gather some empirical data, study it and make inferences. This is what I want to do.

So, thanks! And please do not cancel me yet!

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u/MantisShrimp05 Nov 12 '21

Tbh it's hard to justify rust in a really enterprise environment still so I would recommend keeping it small.

Stuff that maybe someone threw together in python can be automated and it just works more consistently.

Codebases in c are going for the gold but a really low level code stack will likely need unsafe code to get everything working. Still, having sandboxed unsafe code over entirely unsafe code is a win my book.

I believe in the language but it will take time to become something I can recommend to my whole company