alt Hacker News> At least C and C++ have a low barrier of entry and any beginner can write code.
C/C++ is great at giving that false sense of competence. Then suddenly you're getting a segfault, and you'll never determine why with beginner knowledge, since the crash-line and the mistake-line aren't even in the same zipcode (and or same Git changeset).
Rust forces you to not "skip" knowledge steps. If you have a gap in your knowledge/understanding the compiler will call you out immediately. C/C++ will happily let your dangerously bad code compile and kinda-run, until it doesn't.
I'm not anti-C/C++, I've actually written tons. I love C in particular. But saying that they're beginner-friendly feels wrong, a lot of people quit the language because "random stuff" starts to go wrong, and they lack the knowledge to determine why.
Yep. I've heard it said that Rust forces you to experience all the pain up front. C will happily compile very broken code.
One of my formative memories learning C came after I wrote a function which accidentally returned a pointer to a variable on the stack. It took me about a week to track that bug down. I found it eventually - and then realised the compiler had been warning me about it the whole time. I'd just been ignoring the warnings "while I got my code working". Ugh. The rust borrow checker wouldn't let you even compile code like that.
If you're going to be working in a programming language for years or even decades, I think the extra complexity (and extra difficulty while learning) is an investment that will pay off. But I'd be very happy for rust to stay a niche language for systems software. C#, Go, Typescript and Swift seem like great choices for making webpages and apps.