The creator of Ruby on Rails says reading Rust is like “pouring acid in my eyes.” Yet he loves it. I wanted to understand why.

I’m the JavaScript and PHP guy.

Web apps, full stack, a bit of infrastructure: Docker, servers, deploys.

Systems programming? Never needed it. Never wrote about it.

Then my timeline changed. Suddenly everybody is talking about Rust.

Rust this. Rewritten in Rust that. “Blazingly fast” under every other post.

I haven’t written a single line of Rust. So this is the view from outside the fence.

The picture we had of Rust

From where I sat, Rust was what you reach for when you write system code. The low-level stuff, close to the machine.

Same shelf as C and C++. The shelf you need a ladder for.

And the syntax. Here’s a function from the official Rust book :

fn longest < 'a > ( x : & 'a str , y : & 'a str ) -> & 'a str { if x . len ( ) > y .…