What learning curve? Between the borrow checker, copilot, and gpt it’s not really hard to know when to use &.
I’ve been rewriting my python personal project in rust the past month and it’s going much quicker than I expected. And with Dioxus I’ll be able to distribute a full multi platform gui app at 10mb vs python + JS and all the fun that comes with that.
Not everyone works in gpt and copilot. Not only using &, but annotating 'a and 'b and 'c all the call stack and when refactoring, redo it again.
I do not have extensive Rust experience, but the times I tried it got on my way. My background is C++ (20 years using, 14 years working on it). They say that best practices in C++ are in Rust, but I think it is not that similar sometimes even from my mindset when thinking in C++. It is just quite a bit more ceremony in real life IMHO what I saw.
The problem is you're probably well above the median developer in terms of talent. Now imagine all the enterprise devs that do boring Java and C# and only got into software because of the pay not because of any passion for it, and imagine how easy it would be for them to learn Rust.
I have not yet tried copilot with Rust, but when GPT-4 came out I made many experiments with Rust, Python and Java to see what it can do.
My conclusion back then was that Rust was by far the worst and that it is mostly because GPT-4 just didn't get the borrow checker. Coming from C/C++ and being a bit of the opinion that the people complaining about Rust's steep learning curve are often a bit overdramatic, it convinced me that they might actually have a point. If even the LLM doesn't get it...
I’ve been rewriting my python personal project in rust the past month and it’s going much quicker than I expected. And with Dioxus I’ll be able to distribute a full multi platform gui app at 10mb vs python + JS and all the fun that comes with that.