ENB: Why I have no plans to study or use rust

[Edward K. Ream]

Rust is a significant and important programming language, but this Engineering Notebook post tells why I have no plans to study or use it.

High-level overview of rust

Rust might be called a safe version of C++. It is an appropriate language in several contexts:

- When C-like speed is important, as in the Ruff project.

- When code should run natively in a web browser, as in RustPytyhon.

​Rust safety comes from several resources, particularly Rust's memory allocation scheme, including the borrow checker. In practice, Rust's smart pointers (part of the standard library) are essential to keep the borrow checker happy.

Rust's concurrency features also make Rust much safer than C++. These features leverage Rust's memory allocation features.

Summary

Rust is the appropriate choice in several high-profile situations. However, Rust programmers must be constantly aware of implementation-level features. You could say that Rust is like C++ with benefits. For that reason, Python is a better language for experimenting with ideas.

Edward