You may have heard of Mozilla's Rust - a fairly new language developed by Mozilla for their new rendering engine, Servo. Recently, I took a look at Rust, and this post contains my thoughts.

Please note that I am looking at Rust (a compiled language) from the prespective of an interpreted language programmer, since I have not actually learnt any other compiled languages yet.

To start off with, Rust code appears fairly easy to read, and is loosely based on other languages that I already know, such as Javascript. You can quickly get the gist of a piece of Rust code just by reading it through, even without the comments.

The compiler is easy to use for beginners, and also quite helpful when you make mistakes, although some of the error messages are definitely not friendly to a new Rust programmer. I personally got totally confused by the finer points of Rust's type system, and the compiler was most certainly not helpful when it came to sorting the problems out.

The ability to set a variable equal to the output of a complex expression is also nice - allowing you to do this:

fn main() {
    let x = 2u;

    let y = match x {
        0 => "x is zero!",
        1 => "x is one!",
        2 => "x is two!",
        3 => "x is three!",
        4 => "x is four!",
        5 => "x is five!",
        _ => "x is larger than five!"
    };

    println!("{}", y);
}

Rust has some nice language constructs too - the match statement above is an example is this. It looks so much better than the traditional switch statement, and is more flexable as well.

The problem with Rust, though, is that it doesn't really have very many different tutorials and guides out there for new programmers, especially those coming from an interpreted language background, like me. This will sort itself out though, in time. The language itself is also changing frequently, which makes keeping a tutorial updated a considerable amount of work. This also make the language more difficult to learn, since you can't be sure whether the tutorial you are reading is up to date or not. This problem will also gradually disappear on it's own as the language stabilises though.

To conclude, Rust looks like a promising new language that I will resume learning at some point in the future, perhaps when I have more experience with compiled languages (and type systems!), and when rust has stabilised a little more. At the moment Rust does not feel stable enough and mature enough for me to easily learn it.