Hey, folks! I have never used Rust but all the buzz around it made me curious, so I may ask you to forgive my ignorance on the matter. I have a few honest questions about it and I'm pretty sure these questions were answered before, so feel free to point me to this resources, I'd appreciate very much.

First of all what's the point of Rust? OK, it's a systems language, but what does that even mean? You can write a system in any language right? Python is a scripting language and lots of people use it everyday to write systems. What problems is it trying to solve? Also how does it compare to Go? (I haven't used either one or another). It seems to me that both Go and Rust are mainly used by C/C++ folks that want a new shiny language that somehow resemble the syntax or structure or funcionality of the former and at the same time add some modern features (I might be totally wrong by presuming this).

From the perspective of other languages I know a little bit such as Ruby, Python or JS its syntax seems really bloated to me with all those specials symbols. Do you feel more productive writing software in it than in let's say JS? Please keep in mind that I really don't know Rust (nor I've never tried a statically-typed language) and I don't mean to offend anyone.

Thank you guys!

l1ambda

Because you can build things like:

* A faster grep ( https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep )

* A GPU accelerated terminal emulator ( https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty )

* A web browser ( https://servo.org/ )

* A containerization system ( https://github.com/tailhook/vagga )

* An operating system ( https://github.com/redox-os/ )

* An extremely fast text editor ( https://github.com/google/xi-editor )

And be faster and safer than C/C++.

hacker_9

Just like with Javascript, everything must be rebuilt again!..

drzaiusapelord

Except Rust has incredible memory safety, without cumbersome and slow GC, and runs close to C++ speeds, unlike the heavy, wasteful, and slow frameworks you mention like Electron or HTML5.

Rust is a modern C/C++ replacement, or at least tries to be. That's no mean feat.

wulfklaue

Except that there are other languages like Go, Crystal, D, Nim that all offer memory safety ( thanks to there GC ), with a light GC ( like reference counting ). And based upon the same benchmarks that Rust in participates, they are close or even faster at times, with close or better memory usage.

https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks