I'm a Sysadmin and I have started learning Rust this week. I'm not interested in writing network servers or distributed databases or such. I'm hoping to kind of dumb things down and use Rust in place of Python for sysadmin stuff.

I'm very curious into fast Regex, log parsing (string parsing in general) and building easy-to-use command line utilities that are safe(from leaks), crazy fast, and not occupy high level of memory.

Anybody already using Rust in this capacity? have any experiences to share?

> I'm very curious into fast Regex, log parsing (string parsing in general) and building easy-to-use command line utilities that are safe(from leaks), crazy fast, and not occupy high level of memory.

Ever tried to use Perl?

I have not. I admit to not having tried something first hand and falling into the trap of someone else's opinion.

I have heard : Perl is hard to understand after you write the code. Good luck making change to something you wrote last year.

This was not a pleasant thing to hear while choosing a language to learn. I'll give it a shot as well this weekend to see for myself if it matches that opinion..

> I have heard : Perl is hard to understand after you write the code.

So is about any other language, it all depends on who was writing the code. This particular opinion stems from all the non-programmers writing hacky Perl scripts in '90s. The fact that regexps are language primitive doesn't help, because they were often abused in those scripts and it takes time and/or proficiency to decipher and analyze them.