alt Hacker NewsLately rust is my primary language, and I couldn't agree more with this.
I've taken to using typescript for prototyping - since its fast (enough), and its trivial to run both on the server (via bun) or in a browser. The type system is similar enough to rust that swapping back and forth is pretty easy. And there's a great package ecosystem.
I'll get something working, iterate on the design, maybe go through a few rewrites and when I'm happy enough with the network protocol / UI / data layout, pull out rust, port everything across and optimize.
Its easier than you think to port code like this. Our intuition is all messed up when it comes to moving code between languages because we look at a big project and think of how long it took to write that in the first place. But rewriting code from imperative language A to B is a relatively mechanical process. Its much faster than you think. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.
I'm in a similar place, but my stack is Python->Go
With Python I can easily iterate on solutions, observe them as they change, use the REPL to debug things and in general just write bad code just to get it working. I do try to add type annotations etc and not go full "yolo Javascript everything is an object" -style :)
But in the end running Python code on someone else's computer is a pain in the ass, so when I'm done I usually use an LLM to rewrite the whole thing in Go, which in most cases gives me a nice speedup and more importantly I get a single executable I can just copy around and run.
In a few cases the solution requires a Python library that doesn't have a Go equivalent I just stick with the Python one and shove it in a container or something for distribution.