Flattening Rust's Learning Curve

Summary

I see people make the same mistakes over and over again when learning Rust. Here are my thoughts (ordered by importance) on how you can ease the learning process. My goal is to help you save time and frustration. Stop resisting. That’s the most important lesson. Accept that learning Rust requires adopting a completely different mental model than what you’re used to. There are a ton of new concepts to learn like lifetimes, ownership, and the trait system. And depending on your background, you’ll need to add generics, pattern matching, or macros to the list. Your learning pace doesn’t have much to do with whether you’re smart or not or if you have a lot of programming experience. Instead, what matters more is your attitude toward the language. I have seen junior devs excel at Rust with no prior training and senior engineers struggle for weeks/months or even give up entirely. Leave your hubris at home. Treat the borrow checker as a co-author, not an adversary. This reframes the relationship. Let the compiler do the teaching: for example, this works great with lifetimes, because the compiler will tell you when a lifetime is ambiguous. Then just add it but take the time to reason about why the compiler couldn’t figure it out itself. fn longest(x: &str, y: &str) -> &str { if x.len() > y.len() { x } else { y } } If you try to compile this, the compiler will ask you to add a lifetime parameter. It provides this helpful suggestion: 1 | fn longest<'a>(x: &'a str, y: &'a str) -> &'a str { | ++++ ++ ++ ++ So you don’t have to guess what the compiler wants and can follow its instructions. But also sit down and wonder why the compiler couldn’t figure it out itself. Most of the time when fighting the compiler it is actually exposing a design flaw. Similarly, if your code gets overly verbose or looks ugly, there’s probably a better way. Declare defeat and learn to do it the Rust way. If you come from a dynamic language like Python, you’ll find that Rust is more verbose in general. ...