Tim McNamara, a Rust expert with a background in teaching the language at AWS and author of "Rust in Action” and Marco Otte-Witte, Founder of Mainmatter recently talked about adopting Rust. Tim starts by sharing why in his experience Rust is not as hard to learn as many people think it is. The language supports engineers to develop a better understanding of how programs work in general and ultimately become better engineers overall. Google just recently shared that they do not see any negative impact on productivity with Rust compared to other languages. Rust enables engineers to move faster writing code as they know they can't make common mistakes as the compiler would catch those.
Tim goes on to talk about the recent growth that Rust has seen among larger companies and encourages smaller organizations to adopt it as well. He underscores Rust's advantages over dynamic languages, which were more popular in the past, particularly its robust type system, strictness, and benefits for long-term maintainability. Tim and Marco talk about how the industry is turning back to where it was before in a way with a shift in focus back to types, stability, and strictness after a period of time that focused on dynamic, untyped languages and short time from idea to working prototype. That is mainly driven by the need for long-term maintainability which is becoming critical now for apps that were written 10-15y ago in dynamic languages. Those have now reached an age where the maintainability problems with dynamic languages like Ruby become obvious and painful.
Tim and Marco also talk about the fact that many engineers remain unaware of how inefficient most software is in terms of energy consumption. Rust can reduce energy usage by up to 95%, significantly impacting global resource conservation.
Finally, they emphasize the need for senior engineers who are proficient in Rust to mentor juniors within companies in order to make Rust adoption a success. Spreading Rust knowledge is critical to avoid dependencies on isolated groups of developers, ensuring successful integration across the organization.