I’m not sure you are wasting your time by not learning Rust. I think the value of programming languages depend the most on where you live (and where you want to work) and very little on global tends. In my area of Denmark there is virtually no Rust jobs and there haven’t been for the past few years, there are even fewer Go jobs. Plenty of Java, PHP and C# jobs, and basically everyone uses Typescript. Rust has seen some uptake in a lot of the C++ community, but you’re going to need to be a proficient C++ programmer to get at those jobs, and you likely will for at least a decade.
That being said. We recently build a replacement for Sharepoint because we sort of out-grew it and couldn’t find a decent headless CMS that fit our needs and also complied with the EU legislation for the Energy Sector, and since it had to be actually worth moving away from Sharepoint we actually did some thorough proof of concept testing before other needs basically dictated it needed to be ODATA and thus we ended up building it on C#. Anyway, two of the prototypes were Rust and Go, and I would never use Go professionally again if I could help it. Rust on the other hand seems like it’s genuinely a good language that sees actual real world adoption for major projects. I loved Go by the way, but we kept running into packages and libraries which can basically best be described like this: “Y needed to do X and build a library for it. Two years later Y got a new job and the library was semi-abandoned because nobody else really picked it up”. I know a lot of people are building a lot of things with Go, but we kept having to either reinvent the wheel with it, or to become guy X ourselves. Rust didn’t seem to have these issues, likely because it sees more adoption at more places which have similar requirements that we do.
I’m not convinced I’ll ever see Rust blow up in my part of the world though. Out of all the recent hyped languages going back to Ruby on Rails, however, I think Rust may have the biggest shot at it. But I fully expect Typescript, Java, C# and PHP with some Python to remain dominant for the next 10-30 years outside of the areas where they do C++.
> I’m not sure you are wasting your time by not learning Rust. I think the value of programming languages depend the most on where you live (and where you want to work) and very little on global tends. In my area of Denmark there is virtually no Rust jobs and there haven’t been for the past few years, there are even fewer Go jobs. Plenty of Java, PHP and C# jobs, and basically everyone uses Typescript. Rust has seen some uptake in a lot of the C++ community, but you’re going to need to be a proficient C++ programmer to get at those jobs, and you likely will for at least a decade.
It is the same for me too, almost zero Rust jobs where I live. However, I still benefited greatly from learning Rust, making me a better programmer overall. Now I think more about memory allocations, ownership, how I am passing the data around, and mutability.
The thing I want the most from Rust in other languages is the immutability unless you use the mut keyword. I know a lot of OOP or Dynamic loving people might scoff at that, but after a couple of decades in SWE I'd really like for everything to be immutable by default. It's just so much easier to maintain the code-bases and systems over those 5-10 year periods, when being smart is disabled by default.
Sure, it shouldn't be that way, but I prefer it when we design our systems for the code we write on a Thursday afternoon. You know, those days where you've been up all week because of the baby crying and you've spent too much of the day in meetings that shouldn't even have been an e-mail. Because that's the sort of code someone is going to hate 3 years down the line, and chances are that someone might even be yourself. Unfortunately things seem to be going in the opposite direction with some languages. I didn't work with C# for a while, and I was surprised to see "var" everywhere when I came back to it.
That being said. We recently build a replacement for Sharepoint because we sort of out-grew it and couldn’t find a decent headless CMS that fit our needs and also complied with the EU legislation for the Energy Sector, and since it had to be actually worth moving away from Sharepoint we actually did some thorough proof of concept testing before other needs basically dictated it needed to be ODATA and thus we ended up building it on C#. Anyway, two of the prototypes were Rust and Go, and I would never use Go professionally again if I could help it. Rust on the other hand seems like it’s genuinely a good language that sees actual real world adoption for major projects. I loved Go by the way, but we kept running into packages and libraries which can basically best be described like this: “Y needed to do X and build a library for it. Two years later Y got a new job and the library was semi-abandoned because nobody else really picked it up”. I know a lot of people are building a lot of things with Go, but we kept having to either reinvent the wheel with it, or to become guy X ourselves. Rust didn’t seem to have these issues, likely because it sees more adoption at more places which have similar requirements that we do.
I’m not convinced I’ll ever see Rust blow up in my part of the world though. Out of all the recent hyped languages going back to Ruby on Rails, however, I think Rust may have the biggest shot at it. But I fully expect Typescript, Java, C# and PHP with some Python to remain dominant for the next 10-30 years outside of the areas where they do C++.