this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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The JS tooling universe has always seemed like a Lovecraftian hellscape to me. I've managed to stay away from it so far, but if I were caught in it, of course I'd be trying to escape any way I could. It sounds like Rust's attraction here has been as a viable escape corridor rather than anything about Rust per se.
In particular, I get that everyone wants their code to be faster, and I get that certain bloaty apps (browsers) need to get their memory footprint under control, and a few niche areas (OS kernels, realtime control) can't stand GC pauses. Other than that though, what is the attraction of Rust for stuff like tooling? As opposed to a (maybe hypothetical) compiled, GC'd language with a good type system and not too much abstraction inversion (Haskell's weakness, more or less).
Has Golang fizzled? It has struck me as too primitive, but basically on the right track.
Rust seems neat from a language geek perspective, but from what I can tell, it requires considerable effort from the programmer handle a problem (manual storage reclamation) that most programs don't really have. I do want to try it sometime. So the Rust question is intended as more inquisitive/head scratching rather than argumentative.
Maybe give it a try; it's my favorite language to write programs in now, it has an extremely good standard library, and for everything else there's a mass of high quality crates, its build system is actually competent and makes compiling on Windows or Linux trivial, plus many, many more quality of life features.
Yes it's on my infinite todo list. I'm just being too much of a curmudgeon about the available textbooks, and had a sinking feeling when the main one didn't get "hello world" out of the way on page 1, and shift to the specifics of the language.
Rust By Example is very good for showing the ropes in a very practical way, that's how I got up and running with it.
Secondly is the O’Reilly book Programming Rust, which is probably closer to what you want, it explains the actual technical details of much of the language, and to me seems written for an audience that already knows programming. Lastly would be Rust for Rustaceans by No Starch Press, if you actually do want to pursue Rust further, as it discusses very, very in detail the systems of the language, and how they can be used to make something so powerful like Serde.
Thanks, Rust by Example looks ok, and I'm acquainted with one of Programming Rust's authors, which is cool. I'm currently looking at "Comprehensive Rust". All these though seem to be about the Rust software ecosystem (compilers, package tools, libraries) as much as they are about the language. I had hoped to start by just reading about the language, if something like that exists. I don't particularly want to write any Rust programs until I've finished reading some kind of language overview, which means that all the stuff about build tools are just a distraction during that stage. As another commenter in this thread said though, ecosystems and languages have become pretty much inseparable, so maybe that's why the books are that way.
This also looks interesting:
https://dr-knz.net/rust-for-functional-programmers.html
This says nothing about Rust, but it's a humorous classic. I'd be interested to know how to describe Rust in these terms.
https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html