Hello all,

I am a data center engineer of about 8 years now. I've spent the last 3 years or so slowly learning Python(I say slowly not because of my effort, but because learning Python was actually very difficult for me.) I am not an expert in any way shape or form, I understand the concepts of OOP, inheritance, classes, functions, methods, etc and I have found that the python documentation that can be found within the language is usually enough for me to be able to write the programs that I want to write. Very rarely have I had to write programs that have to bypass the GIL, but occasionally, I have created threadpools for applications that are not I/O intensive. What I'm saying is, for most things that I create, performance is enough with Python.

However, I have been inspired by how much love Rust is getting from the people who use Rust. I have tried to find some books for using Rust for network automation and unfortunately I have not been able to find any reputable books.

Most of the "automation" work that I do involves parsing data with regex, restructuring the data, converting the data into a modeled format and transforming something with that data. Does anyone have any common use cases for Rust that might interest me? Has anyone used Rust for network automation tools? With familiarity, can Rust's intuitiveness match Python's "from idea to deployment" speed? Or should I only learn Rust if I intend to create applications that need tight performance?

  • nous@programming.dev
    ·
    1 year ago

    With familiarity, can Rust’s intuitiveness match Python’s “from idea to deployment” speed?

    Likely not at the start. Rust can take some time to learn to use it effectively it is not the fastest at throwing shit together quickly.

    Or should I only learn Rust if I intend to create applications that need tight performance?

    Also no. IMO rusts performance is only a nice by product of the language, yeah it encourages people to try it out, but they don't stay for the speed. They stay for the tooling and the feeling that once it compiles it will likely just work they way you intended. Rust forces you to think more about correctness and edge cases of your code - which does slow down initial idea to working prototype a bit. But IMO it quickly pays back dividends when you get something into production and it just works with no random crashing in the middle of the night.

    It also makes refactoring a joy to do, where I hate refactoring in languages like python as you never know what you might have broken - likely something that you will find out only after you have deployed to production. Instead the compiler catches basically every thing that you missed before it will even let you run the code - so those edge cases are taken care of when you are developing, not after it fails in production.

    I also find it is very nice with data processing/transformation as it lets you use functional coding styles which tend to lean towards clearer/easier to read series of data transforms.

    If you want to learn it I would recomend starting out with the offical book, but you might also find zero to production or datawithrust interesting reads as well.