Disclaimer: I've used D for an enormous time, and I tried Rust for about one hour for the experience.
Remarks:
- build times are worse in Rust, but not _that_ much worse
- with Rust error messages are plentiful and helpful to solve the error. It is a designed user experience, which is quite novel.
- the first Rust program I built downloaded no less than 146 packages, which seems to indicate the standard library is very barebones. This was an example program. So the granularity of package seems to be smaller there. I don't really like this.
- Rust has quite visibly a stronger open-source ecosystem, with lots of crates being built before a compiler release. Good.
- Rust documentation is more aimed at beginner programmers, and there is more of it.
- I just don't like to look at Rust code at all... the styling on the car is really bad
- it seems dub and cargo are very similar. Cargo download and installs a lot more cruft inside directories. Probably there is a way to have a shared directory for that.
- Rust libraries look a bit more systematically modular with the features tags ("configurations" in DUB parlance)
- it seems Rust has comparatively more C bindings than C-to-D translations in the ecosystem (vs D)
So... I'm not sure I would take Rust if starting a codebase today.
It just doesn't add up for me versus D.
I try to be someone practical and need actual measurable improvements in the daily practice.
For me the key take-away is the very consistent experience when interfacing with Rust tools, since this experience has been designed and fine-tuned to be easy. I think D can learn some UX tricks from it.
Remarks:
- build times are worse in Rust, but not _that_ much worse
- with Rust error messages are plentiful and helpful to solve the error. It is a designed user experience, which is quite novel.
- the first Rust program I built downloaded no less than 146 packages, which seems to indicate the standard library is very barebones. This was an example program. So the granularity of package seems to be smaller there. I don't really like this.
- Rust has quite visibly a stronger open-source ecosystem, with lots of crates being built before a compiler release. Good.
- Rust documentation is more aimed at beginner programmers, and there is more of it.
- I just don't like to look at Rust code at all... the styling on the car is really bad
- it seems dub and cargo are very similar. Cargo download and installs a lot more cruft inside directories. Probably there is a way to have a shared directory for that.
- Rust libraries look a bit more systematically modular with the features tags ("configurations" in DUB parlance)
- it seems Rust has comparatively more C bindings than C-to-D translations in the ecosystem (vs D)
So... I'm not sure I would take Rust if starting a codebase today. It just doesn't add up for me versus D.
I try to be someone practical and need actual measurable improvements in the daily practice.
For me the key take-away is the very consistent experience when interfacing with Rust tools, since this experience has been designed and fine-tuned to be easy. I think D can learn some UX tricks from it.