Why I Chose Rust

November 6, 2015    Rust Programming Coding

Welcome to my newest learning venture!

I wanted another language to sink my teeth into, one a bit different from Ruby. I considered several; Elixir, Go, and Rust.

I am not totally sure why I ruled out Elixir. I think overall, the ‘feel’ of the language did not draw me in right away. Yes, I realize there was a lot of “touchy feely” in that statement, but what first brought me to ruby was an experience that made me smile and I have not gotten that feeling with Elixir.

I tried Go, again the feel of the language did not blow me away. I liked seeing the language already being used, an accomplishment for a language that is just 3 years old as I am writing this. However, as I am looking to learn and not necessarily put something in production tomorrow, I also have the option to grow with the language a bit.

Last I tried Rust. Primarily, I knew about Rust from some recent recordings of Steve Klabnik, as well as Sean from The Bike Shed talking about his usage of Rust recently. Again, I go back to the “feel” thing, but there was something about Rust that brought a smile to my face. I think the syntax still has a very Ruby feel, curly brackets and semi-colons aside. I also like that Rust could be embedded in Ruby (more on that in a future post) and I enjoyed the community around it.

Please don’t take this as me knocking the other languages. I think there are great use case for the other two and they both have communities around them as well. Something about Rust clicked with me and that is why I am enjoying exploring it deeper.