It’s no secret that I’ve fully embraced AI for my coding. A valid concern (and one I’ve been thinking about deeply) is the atrophying of the part of my brain that helps me code.
To push back on that, I’ve been learning Rust on the side for the last few months. I am absolutely loving it.
Why Rust? #
Systems level language #
Kotlin remains my go-to language. It’s the language I know like the back of my hand. If someone sends me a swath of Kotlin code, whether handwritten or AI generated, I can quickly grok it and form a strong opinion on how to improve it.
But Kotlin is a high-level language that runs on a JVM. There are structural limits to the performance you can eke out of it, and for most of my career1 I’ve worked with garbage-collected languages.
For a change, I wanted a systems-level language, one without the training wheels of a garbage collector.
New paradigms #
I also wanted a language with a different core philosophy, something that would force me to think in new ways.
I picked up Go casually but it didn’t feel like a big enough departure from the languages I already knew.
It just felt more useful to ask AI to generate Go code than to learn it myself.
With Rust, I could get code translated, but then I’d stare at the generated code and realize I was missing some core concepts and fundamentals. I loved that!
The first time I hit a lifetime error, I had no mental model for it. That confusion was exactly what I was looking for.
Coming from a GC world, memory management is an afterthought — if it requires any thought at all. Rust really pushes you to think through the ownership and lifespan of your data, every step of the way.
In a bizarre way, AI made this gap obvious. It showed me where I didn’t understand things and pointed me toward something worth learning.
Built with Rust #
Here’s some software that’s either built entirely in Rust or uses it in fundamental ways:
- fd (my tool of choice for finding files)
- ripgrep (my tool of choice for searching files)
- Fish shell (my shell of choice, recently rewrote in Rust)
- Zed (my text/code editor of choice)
- Firefox (my browser of choice)
- Android?! That’s right: Rust now powers some of the internals of the OS, including the recent Quick Share feature.
Many of the most important tools I use daily are built with Rust. Can’t hurt to know the language they’re written in.