I’m not a Rust expert by any means, but I’ve spent enough time with the language that I can write reasonable code with a bit of effort (and a lot of DuckDuckGo). However, I’ve found that I often hesitate to use it for my personal projects.
Rust is a large language. The sheer number of features and their complexity introduce so much cognitive overhead while writing code that I can’t always muster up the mental energy to use it for things I’m simply tinkering around with after work. It’s just not possible for me to keep the whole thing in my head.
If I was writing Rust for my day job, it would be a different matter. Using it to build production software every day would let me internalize it to the point that it would become mostly automatic. It would let me cement difficult concepts in my brain so that I wouldn’t have to go looking for explanations every five minutes (lifetimes, anyone?)
Sadly I only get to use Rust for one-off side-projects, which means I spend maybe two hours a week using it. This gives me barely enough time to get my code into a working state, let alone dive into things like the Rustonomicon or even macros.
I love Rust, so I’m going to continue using it despite my issues with it. I’ll just have to lower my expectations of the level of proficiency I can hope to attain with the language.
PS: somebody please give me a Rust job 😭
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