This article hit home... I took a similar approach and spent bit of time over the summer to familiarize myself with the language by writing a ray tracer. (Super simple, not as fancy as the one in the article.)
After spending as much time lately as I have in Scala and Python, my immediate reaction to Rust was quite positive. Python has performance issues from 1985 and the build ecosystem seems borderline chaotic. (Made me seriously miss Maven, etc.) Scala seems a lot like C++ - an amazing intellectual accomplishment, a great place to spend all of your time, but not so good as a part time language. (I spend a bunch of my time in Scala mentally expanding out shorthand notation the way I might be mentally macroexpanding in a Lisp.)
Rust, in contrast, seems to have struck a nice balance between expressive power and runtime performance. Expressively, it has a lot of what I like about Scala with a syntax that makes more sense to my C-style upbringing. Performance seems to be everything I'd expect from the fully compiled language that it is. (In terms of performance, there's no way Python would've let me get away with some of what I got away with in my Rust ray tracer.)
Given that the language gave such a positive initial impression, the questions I still have are more about what it feels like in the large. ie: Working with a significantly sized team jointly on a codebase that might last 1, 5, 10 or more years. (Even then, I'm pretty optimistic.)
https://github.com/mschaef/rust-rt
After spending as much time lately as I have in Scala and Python, my immediate reaction to Rust was quite positive. Python has performance issues from 1985 and the build ecosystem seems borderline chaotic. (Made me seriously miss Maven, etc.) Scala seems a lot like C++ - an amazing intellectual accomplishment, a great place to spend all of your time, but not so good as a part time language. (I spend a bunch of my time in Scala mentally expanding out shorthand notation the way I might be mentally macroexpanding in a Lisp.)
Rust, in contrast, seems to have struck a nice balance between expressive power and runtime performance. Expressively, it has a lot of what I like about Scala with a syntax that makes more sense to my C-style upbringing. Performance seems to be everything I'd expect from the fully compiled language that it is. (In terms of performance, there's no way Python would've let me get away with some of what I got away with in my Rust ray tracer.)
Given that the language gave such a positive initial impression, the questions I still have are more about what it feels like in the large. ie: Working with a significantly sized team jointly on a codebase that might last 1, 5, 10 or more years. (Even then, I'm pretty optimistic.)