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content/posts/thoughts_on_rust.md

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+---
+title: "Rust is pretty good (Short thoughts on Rust)"
+date: 2024-04-09T21:31:01-04:00
+topics: ['rust', 'Opinions', 'software development']
+---
+
+In my current position I've had to swap to full time Rust development.
+After about 2 months of full time Rust development I think I'll likely be developing projects in Rust in the future instead of C++ when performance is important.
+My reasons for this are primarily:
+
+1. Just Works™ build system and crates.io makes drawing in libraries painless
+2. Guaranteed memory safety is pretty nice
+3. Syntax is much cleaner and succinct than C++, with lots of nice syntax sugar to sweeten the package
+4. Easily integrable with C (and therefore C++ with some massaging)
+5. Proc macros are pretty nice as well
+6. Built-in test framework
+
+I think that point 3 is potentially the biggest factor for me as the C++ modern syntax is not what I would consider clean, especially if you are trying to use a more functional programming style. 
+A simple example highlighting the difference:
+
+**C++**
+```c++
+vector<int> v(10,1);
+std::transform(v.cbegin(), v.cend(), v.begin(), [](int value){ value + 1;})
+```
+
+**Rust**
+```rust
+let v = vec![1;10];
+let v = v.map(|val| val + 1).collect()
+```
+**I think that speaks for itself...**(Although I prefer the C++ lambdas which don't auto capture)
+
+I'm not sure that I consider myself a Rustacean though as some seemingly simple programming tasks can become huge mountains due to the borrow rules Rust enforces.
+Once you learn the borrow rules and some of the tricks, the language itself ends up being very clean to write and easy to test.
+I probably won't be writing C++ in the future unless I have a very specific/niche reason to. 
+I recommend checking Rust out if you haven't yet, it may surprise you!
+
+