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is Rust really that powerful / intuitive? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello all,

I am a data center engineer of about 8 years now. I've spent the last 3 years or so slowly learning Python(I say slowly not because of my effort, but because learning Python was actually very difficult for me.) I am not an expert in any way shape or form, I understand the concepts of OOP, inheritance, classes, functions, methods, etc and I have found that the python documentation that can be found within the language is usually enough for me to be able to write the programs that I want to write. Very rarely have I had to write programs that have to bypass the GIL, but occasionally, I have created threadpools for applications that are not I/O intensive. What I'm saying is, for most things that I create, performance is enough with Python.

However, I have been inspired by how much love Rust is getting from the people who use Rust. I have tried to find some books for using Rust for network automation and unfortunately I have not been able to find any reputable books.

Most of the "automation" work that I do involves parsing data with regex, restructuring the data, converting the data into a modeled format and transforming something with that data. Does anyone have any common use cases for Rust that might interest me? Has anyone used Rust for network automation tools? With familiarity, can Rust's intuitiveness match Python's "from idea to deployment" speed? Or should I only learn Rust if I intend to create applications that need tight performance?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Rust is a great language but it really has a lot of up-front costs. Whether you are learning it for the first time, or starting a new project, both. Python is always going to be faster "from idea to deployment."

I think like the other person said, start with the Rust book. It really is a perfectly good introduction. But what I think you'll find is if you want to be productive with Rust you will need to get the ground rules down or else you will be constantly tripping on the borrow checker and ownership rules. If you think you are getting somewhere with the book, try rewriting something you've done in Python. If that works out, great! If not, it's OK to accept that Rust might not be worth your time.