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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Eric S Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", blogs via Ibiblio

I wanted to like Rust. I really did. I've been investigating it for months, from the outside, as a C replacement with stronger correctness guarantees that we could use for NTPsec [a hardened implementation of Network Time Protocol].

[...] I was evaluating it in contrast with Go, which I learned in order to evaluate as a C replacement a couple of weeks back.

[...] In practice, I found Rust painful to the point of unusability. The learning curve was far worse than I expected; it took me those four days of struggling with inadequate documentation to write 67 lines of wrapper code for [a simple IRC] server.

Even things that should be dirt-simple, like string concatenation, are unreasonably difficult. The language demands a huge amount of fussy, obscure ritual before you can get anything done.

The contrast with Go is extreme. By four days in of exploring Go, I had mastered most of the language, had a working program and tests, and was adding features to taste.

Have you tried using Rust, Go or any other language that might replace C in the future? What are your experiences?

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