Ask Lemmy

I'm just a hobbyist with like a single big project I'm maintaining but I'm starting to hate the code and idk maybe I should rewrite it in rust

I would argue that this, at least with any time limit is the worst place to start Rust or any new language. Your issues are likely going to be due to project structure, maintainability, and more rather than the language it's in. Adding Rust would just add a new layer of pain (say hello to my little borrow checker and lifetimes). You would probably be better served studying up on project structure, side effects, testing, and maintainability in general first and maybe trying to refactor yourself out of your hole one section/functionality at a time.

That said, I do like Rust (though I mostly do Go these days) and you can always go through the tutorials and cookbook to see what you think; worst case, you lose a couple hours of your life.

Another suggestion I have yet to see mentioned is Zig. It’s easier to learn than Rust but just as powerful. It’s arguably more ambitious than even Rust because they are approaching LLVM as well as building a C/C++ replacement.

Let me start by saying I love Rust and think it's great. I've been writing some personal stuff in Rust and it's all that I've been looking for.

However there is some stuff you said that makes me think Rust won't be something you would fully appreciate Rust. Firstly every project, regardless of language, when it becomes big it becomes a hassle to maintain, especially if you're not experienced enough to have set up a good architecture from the start.

But more importantly, a lot of Rust benefits are stuff you didn't mention, and some of the stuff you mentioned is not that important.

• Speed: Performance gains will be minimal, most of the time your server takes on an API call is read/write disk/Network, and that takes as long as it takes regardless of language. Sure synthetic benchmark will tell you it's twice the speed for a hello world, but the moment you start relying on outside stuff the line gets murky.
• Less resources: Again, unless you have at least 10 instances of your service or are trying to get it to run in very minimal hardware conditions, you're not likely to see any meaningful improvement. Sure your service now uses half the amount of RAM, but the hardware where you're running it likely has a couple orders of magnitude more RAM than that anyways.
• Garbage collection: You say that like it's a bad word, but at the same time admit to have problems with C/C++, whose main differences are related to that.
• Compilation: I don't think you're taking compilation into consideration, from line change to retest we're talking a couple of minutes depending on the change. That can be annoying really fast, especially if you don't understand the reason. Also, the Rust compiler is EXTREMELY pedantic, it will not let you compile stuff that you think should work because there's an edge case that you've forgotten to consider because it's not something you cared about, e.g. you can't have global mutable variables because that can cause race conditions on multi-threading applications.
• Security: you didn't mention this but it's one of the largest advantages of Rust, things like the Option or Result types as well as the match statements and the borrow checker are amazing and unmatched by anything else out there.
• The Rust price: Rust is not free, you just pay beforehand, you win execution time at the expense of compiling time, you save on runtime errors at the expense of pedantic code checks, etc, etc. Rust is excellent if you understand why, and are willing to pay that price. Rust is for people who when the compiler says "you can't do this because it will cause problems with X edge case" say "of course! Thanks!", if you think "ugh, that's never gonna happen, stupid compiler" then it's not for you. To add to that, Rust can become quite complicated because of it.
• A different way of structuring: Rust does not have classes or any OOP paradigms, it's different from other stuff you've used and requires changes in how you structure your hada and application. Whether that's for the best or not is very personal, but it's definitely different.

Finally I would like to finish up saying that Rust has the most excellent documentation: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ read that, then maybe do these https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings if you get to the error types and are not drooling over the language, it might not be for you.

I'm starting to hate the code

That's an excellent situation for change.

I'm going to answer some questions I'm hearing in you question:

"I'm interested in X, should I learn X?”

The answer is pretty much always ”yes”, to that question.

"Is Rust a good/terrible fit for my project?”

Rust is a solid tool. It'll probably do fine.

C/C++ senior developer here.

If you don't know, learn Python.

There are very few things python can't do on a hobby level. It's simple and have tons of libraries and tutorials and so on. Also, no need to set up a compiler or so, it just runs straight out of the box. PyCharm is a simple and elegant IDE with debugging, but you could start out with the simplest text editor just to check things out.

HTH

Give it a shot!

Rust can be a real pain in the ass: it's like having to solve mini logic puzzles as you're writing your code. At best, it's fun, at worst, it's a distraction and source of frustration.

You can always stop the rewrite if you discover you don't like Rust.

Hating the code is normal. After a while you start to realize all the hard to change decisions you made long ago. What you don't know is if those decisions you wish you had made would be better. There have been a lot of fads over the decades, some of them are complete junk, but the majority have some good points. However all of them have some negatives as well, and there is no obvious answer to which negative is right to accept for your projects.

The ideal answer is spend 20 years learning lots of different options, then find a time machine and go back in time to and restart the project based on what you have learned. Of course at the end of that 20 years you will hear about some new thing you didn't try, but you have to draw the line somewhere. (finding a time machine is left as an exercise for the reader)

Rust is an interesting language with some nice memory safety guarantees. As a C++ developer it speaks to some of the problems I have - but most of my problems with C++ are with 15 year old code from before I was able to use C++11. ( had to put a lot of effort into getting this good with c++ though, Rust is likely a lot easier to learn to my level). The Ada/Spark advocates have long been saying things that really speak to me as well - formally proven code sounds great, though there are others who tell me it isn't as good as the advocates claim. Go has some advocates saying interesting things as well, though they don't speak to the issues I personally have as much it might be better for you.

If you are writing all new code then I would put Rust high on the list. However most programs are adding to something that exists and the friction of writing Rust to existing code is often high enough that I'd stick with what the other code is written in.

That depends from the language you're using now. To really appreciate and understand Rust's borrow checker you need to have some experience in C or similar language. For someone who have used only Python before Rust will look really weird and messy

If you either hate yourself, or somehow manage to forget C/C++, JavaScript, Python and probably some more random languages, then yes. Because Rust is basically just a confusing, illogical mix of all of that. Otherwise, as others pointed out, learn anything else that is - if that's what you want - memory safe, statically typed, yadda yadda yadda, and has a good dependency system, compiler and syntax. Other languages could very well fit much better too, depending on available libraries and features in general.

What is the code written in now? What happens if you clean it up? What is the project if I can ask? Everything has a runtime, though some are more complex than others. You might like OCaml which is where Rust got some ideas, or Haskell if you like brain benders. Rust (like C) is for when you need very efficient code, and you incur some pain in order to get that.