Learning Rust in 2024
Over the past year, I learned Rust. In fact, I migrated Datadog static analyzer from Java to Rust (more in this article).
I think Rust is a good programming language but also overhyped. It is very fast, very safe, but its learning curve is extremely steep.
I recommend Rust for anything that needs to be fast and safe. But anything else, I would recommend using Go, Java or Python. The cost of software maintenance always outweigh operating costs. As Rust is harder to learn and has fewer engineers on the market, you should use it only if you have to.
Do not get me wrong, I like the language and its ecosystem. But liking something is different from recommending its use in production without reserve.
For those who still want to learn Rust, there are the resources I used.
Books
- Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development
- Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice
Online Articles
- The Rustonomicon on unsafe, data layout, threads, atomics
- Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists: excellent (long) articles to re-learn Rust core concepts