this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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I've learned dozens of languages over 40 years. Rust is one of the hardest I have tried to use for serious projects. It introduces completely new concepts that need to be deeply understood to be productive. It's also one of the most convenient, well-tooled, and expressive languages I've used. But c'mon, as languages go, Rust is deep into BDSM territory.
As someone who routinely works on a complicated C++ codebase, had to use C, Python, and Java all the time through school, has had to use absolute trash like JavaScript and PHP, and has dabbled in languages similar-ish to Rust like Go and Swift, Rust to me is simple to work with.
The compiler is extremely helpful when I do something wrong, it has sensible conventions like immutability by default, Cargo is a streamlined build system, I've found the documentation easy to read, I actually prefer curly brace-delimited scopes to tabbed ones and explicit type declarations for readability, and in the obvious comparison to C/C++, Rust lacks extremely common memory footguns.
Obviously compared to Python – with its mountain of syntax sugar and a library for everything – Rust is going to be more difficult. But for languages in general? Rust is not at all one of the harder ones I've learned or used.
(Btw I hate Java; it's the worst language I've ever used.)
This is the most fediverse thread I've seen in years
How many times have you spent an entire day not moving forward on a project because you couldn't figure out what the borrow checker was trying to tell you? Maybe you're just a 10X developer. I feel quite qualified to inform you that for we mere mortals, Rust can very fairly be described as a relatively hard language.
Rust has completely unique paradigms not expressed in any other language! Things that no one coming to Rust has prior experience with. If you cannot admit that makes it harder than some random language that just fucks with syntax, ...dude
I'm surprised you put C in there. Its limited vocabulary does mean you don't have to deal with e.g. C++'s 50 million ways to do something, but this combined with a lack of guardrails makes it agonizingly difficult to do a lot of basic things – most notoriously dealing with strings.
I actually consider C a good beginner language, but only in the sense that 1) it does have that simple toolkit, 2) it and its descendants are widely used, and most importantly 3) the bullshit C makes you deal with gives you a better understanding of what higher-level languages do for you automatically and why. To me, it's probably the hardest mainstream language to learn after maybe something like x86 or ARM assembly (which, for better or worse, hit points 1 and 3 even harder than C).
I generally agree though that Rust has always been somewhere in the middle for me.
I think the borrow checker is trying to tell me to use clone on recursive calls inside a double nested loop!
Which paradigm do you even refer to? Lifetimes? A C++ developer who cannot understand lifetimes (at least conceptually) in a day is a terrible developer.
I would know, I work with such people.
To answer your first question, I've definitely spent days of my life trying to fix c++ templates because the compiler won't fucking tell me what's actually wrong. It loves telling me some unrelated copy constructor is deleted though... And all of that is actually worse with new stuff like ranges. Which are great on paper, but are a maintainability nightmare.
I've had a similar experience. Yes, I have had days where I spent a significant amount of time beating my head against the wall, but that's part of the learning curve. Those days stretched farther apart pretty rapidly.
I had to do c++ template metaprogramming (insane, stay away from it at all costs), Rust makes me think of that in a more better modern way.
Easy? I wouldn't say, and the compiler is slow ☺️
I love python but only as a scripting language because of GIL and the ridiculous performance (and it's not really suited for "large" projects). But if you need a little thing it's so fast to spin up.
Disclaimer: am old C/C++ dev.