(Not) Learning Rust

I want Rust to succeed.  It seems like the best gambit for fixing C, where the slightest mistake is likely to be a security hole… or to be turned into one by a newer compiler version.

On the other hand, actually learning it has proven extremely difficult.  Very little of Rust is explained in terms of something else; and all of the basic mechanics of the language feel weird.

After the Rust Book and the Cookbook and maybe some other stuff from Awesome Rust, I went through the tutorial about writing very bad linked lists; there were places that were like, “Can we do X? [code that does X].”  I would stop there, run that code, and try to solve the error myself.  I never could. I would read on, and it would be, “The error tells us we need to call F” so I’d try to figure out how to call F.  I never could figure it out, even with that hint. And I still didn’t have the capability to go from error message to even discovering F, let alone understanding that F would apply to the error.

I threw myself at the wall several times, and failed to advance past the part where one writes a number-guessing game for the CLI.

Moreover, I don’t have a motivating project to “learn Rust” with.  It’s mostly an exercise in following other people’s code, breaking it, or trying to improve it, and ending up with incomprehensible and unactionable errors.  The compiler errors try to be helpful, but if the code starts out far enough off the rails, it’s just flailing, same as me.

When a survey comes in that says “Opinions of Rust are very favorable, but people aren’t using it,” I understand.  I understand completely.  We all want something to fix entire bug classes, but keep the bare-metal performance, and Rust is basically without competition there.  But we can’t all devote enough time and energy to learning Rust from scratch.