I've spent the last few months porting the guts of a 100 KLOC PHP command-line utility I wrote to Rust. Thanks to the wonderful Rust documentation it's been a mostly painless endeavour.
- a bunch of time thinking about the borrow checker
Quick iteration and concise readable code are much more important in web-land than in system programming land, and those are key reasons why I don't think many will be abandoning interpreted langauges for Rust.
I sometimes wonder whether people adopt Rust/Haskell/ReasonML for front-end work because they want it to feel like more of an effort than it otherwise would.
What I've gained as a result:
- execution speed (about 3x faster, single-threaded)
- better-documented data structures
Things I've lost:
- ease of iteration
- concise, readable code
- really smart type inference
- a bunch of time thinking about the borrow checker
Quick iteration and concise readable code are much more important in web-land than in system programming land, and those are key reasons why I don't think many will be abandoning interpreted langauges for Rust.
I sometimes wonder whether people adopt Rust/Haskell/ReasonML for front-end work because they want it to feel like more of an effort than it otherwise would.