> Not All Programming is Systems Programming
Personally I often use Rust for "non systems-programming" tasks, even though I really wish a more suitable language existed.
Rust has plenty of downsides, but hits a particular sweet spot for me that is hard to find elsewhere:
* Expressive, pretty powerful, ML and Haskell inspired type system
* Memory safe. In higher level code you have almost zero justification for `unsafe`, unless you really need a C library.
* Immutable by default. Can feel almost functional, depending on code style.
* Error handling (it's not perfect by any means, but much better than exceptions in my book)
* Very coherent language design. The language has few warts, in part thanks to the young age.
* Great package manager and build system.
* Good tooling in general (compiler errors, formatter, linter, docs generation, ... )
* Library availability is great for certain domains, decent for many.
* Statically compiled. Mostly statically linked. Though I often wish there was an additional interpreter/JIT with a REPL.
* Good performance without much effort.
* Good concurrency/parallelism primitives, especially since async
* Increasingly better IDE support, thanks to the author of this blog post! (rust-analyzer)
So I often accept the downsides of Rust, even for higher level code, because I don't know another language that fits.
My closest alternatives would probably be Go, Haskell or F#. But each don't fit the above list one way or another.
Personally I often use Rust for "non systems-programming" tasks, even though I really wish a more suitable language existed.
Rust has plenty of downsides, but hits a particular sweet spot for me that is hard to find elsewhere:
* Expressive, pretty powerful, ML and Haskell inspired type system
* Memory safe. In higher level code you have almost zero justification for `unsafe`, unless you really need a C library.
* Immutable by default. Can feel almost functional, depending on code style.
* Error handling (it's not perfect by any means, but much better than exceptions in my book)
* Very coherent language design. The language has few warts, in part thanks to the young age.
* Great package manager and build system.
* Good tooling in general (compiler errors, formatter, linter, docs generation, ... )
* Library availability is great for certain domains, decent for many.
* Statically compiled. Mostly statically linked. Though I often wish there was an additional interpreter/JIT with a REPL.
* Good performance without much effort.
* Good concurrency/parallelism primitives, especially since async
* Increasingly better IDE support, thanks to the author of this blog post! (rust-analyzer)
So I often accept the downsides of Rust, even for higher level code, because I don't know another language that fits.
My closest alternatives would probably be Go, Haskell or F#. But each don't fit the above list one way or another.