Learning Rust by comparing to Ruby

Rust is continually on the annual lists of languages people love, and with good reason. It’s performant. Its compiler is developer-friendly. The community is approachable and accommodating. The ecosystem is mature. But it has a reputation for having a steep learning curve.

It’s hard to learn any new language, harder to become production-ready with it, and even harder still to convince your boss to actually let you use the new language in production. Rust opens a new way of thinking about programming that carries over into other languages as well.

Your knowledge of Ruby influences how you view and write in other programming languages. Similarly, as you develop an understanding of Rust, it will also influence how you think when writing code. Even if you were to never use Rust in production, you’ll still benefit and grow as a programmer.

We’ll start this chapter by taking a look at what makes Ruby such a great language. You’ll see why Rust is a similarly great language and why its future is bright. But before we talk about Rust, let’s talk about Ruby.