Especially on reddit / HN, as well as blogosphere, rust is touted as one language to rule lot of things. Unlike, say Go, which draws lot of criticism, there are much less accounts on disadvantages of rust.<p>Not considering toolchain / language maturity & stability, what are disadvantages of rust?
I would say<p>- The ABI is not stable yet<p>- The compiler is not the fastest<p>- Doesn't work on all architectures (compared to C in the embedded space)<p>While those are potential downsides, they don't have to be. It all depends on what you're using it for and the language you're coming from.
I would ignore the "learning curve" comments as they're (in my opinion) irrelevant. You learn it once and then reap the benefit for the rest of your career so a couple of months of investment doesn't sound that bad.
The biggest issue which is inherent to the language is the learning curve. I feel there is limit beyond which language cannot be made easy to learn. I still claim it is worth learning Rust, however my point should still stand.<p>From personal experience:
Our company had tailor made use-case to use Rust (switching from Python), more than Go. Experiments were performed and Rust outperformed Go in all aspects (time, CPU, memory). Everyone acknowledged but CTO (who knows C/C++ very well, he is a filesystem developer) decided to select Go. CTO was bullish on Rust to start with but developed cold-feet later. He told me that the only reason was that it is easy to train people in Go than in Rust. This one single thing trumped everything in my case. When I look back, I see his point & I respect that.<p>While issues like portability, eco-system, ABI stability, etc are important, these are not inherent problems with the language itself. They will get better over the time.
<a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/c0xwjd/all_i_hear_about_is_how_great_rust_is_what_isnt/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/c0xwjd/all_i_hear_abo...</a><p>> Not considering toolchain / language maturity & stability, what are disadvantages of rust?<p>You can't really "not consider" these things - they're big factors in any decision you might want to make. If you think the Rust toolchain and language ecosystem are half-baked and not yet ready for prime time, that's quite important!
I think there is a part of criticism on Go which are not relevant. The language has been designed to be "simple" and it do the job.
The latest posts on Go were only for the Karma, re-post, no new elements, no fair statements.<p>To answer to your question, I will say it will take you time to understand and to be productive with Rust.<p>But, please stop, Go and Rust can't be compared, they don't have the same goal in mind.
Rust is criticized on in too, but you can't read the criticism because it's downmodded to the background color. ;)<p>For me, Rust fundamentally doesn't offer anything that 1) I want and 2) Python doesn't already have. The language I want is a better version of Python, not a better version of C++.