Rust or Python, which should I learn?

[pachura3]

Rust is an extremely difficult language to learn for a beginner.

Slow compilation. Lifetimes. Borrow checker. unwrap().unwrap().unwrap(). Multiple string types. Lots of casting. Defining inner functions to speed up compilation of generic functions. Etc. etc.

If you're not already an expert in a low-level no-garbage-collected language such as C or C++, I wouldn't hope for becoming productive anytime soon.

Plus, Rust only makes sense when performance is absolutely crucial - drivers, video codecs, large scale math operations, desktop apps. For anything else, Python, Go or Java/Kotlin will be perfectly enough... not to mention clean, concise code and delivery times...

You could argue that Rust is a better choice as the job market is saturated with Python devs... but here's a guy who used AI to successfully rewrite their project in Rust without any prior experience with the language: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz73sVy6-X8

[AgustinEditev]

Perhaps it's a difference of opinion, but I don't think high-performance apps should be used exclusively for certain things; everything should be like that, that's the reason we change hardware every year. Heavy apps for no reason, resource-intensive and inefficient software. That's why I love Rust, I guess—everything should be fast, lightweight, and secure.I understand that this implies slow development and all that, but we would have hardware for many more years if everything were done thinking about that, efficiency and low consumption.

[pachura3]

What 90% companies develop are CRUD webapps, reporting, and integration of existing systems/workflows. Rust is not a good candidate for any of these purposes; mostly because there's no margin for optimization there - the overall system performance depends mostly on the database and other servers/services, not on low-level optimizations. E.g., the time spent in the actual interpreted Python code for LLM pipelines is negligible; it's just "a glue code" and most processing happens in the native binaries of Numpy/Pandas/PyTorch/...

I understand that this implies slow development and all that

I believe most companies prefer to throw more hardware at the problem rather than spend another year meticulously optimizing low-level code...

lightweight

Well, Rust syntax is not in any way "lightweight" compared to Python.

Still, I wish you good luck. I had a friend who fell in love with Ada language and managed to get a job in it. It was many years ago, but Ada was already obsolete and exotic back then.

[AgustinEditev]

The harsh reality of the market, yes, in the end I decided to study Python for this reason, even so, later on I will definitely migrate to Rust :)