Thoughts on Learning Rust in 2025

I finally took the plunge and started learning Rust. Here are my honest thoughts after a few months.

The Learning Curve

Let’s not sugarcoat it — Rust has a steep learning curve. The borrow checker will humble you. But here’s the thing: every error message teaches you something about how memory actually works.

Coming from Python and TypeScript, the biggest shift was thinking about ownership. Who owns this data? How long does it live? These are questions I never had to ask before.

What I Love

• The type system is incredible. Once it compiles, it usually works.
• Pattern matching is so expressive compared to if/else chains.
• Cargo is the best package manager I’ve used. Period.
• Error handling with Result<T, E> is elegant and forces you to handle failures.

What’s Hard

• Lifetimes are confusing at first. I still reach for clone() more than I should.
• Async Rust is a whole different beast. Tokio is powerful but complex.
• Compile times for large projects can be frustrating.

Would I Recommend It?

Absolutely. Even if you never write production Rust, learning it makes you a better programmer. You’ll understand memory, concurrency, and types at a deeper level.

Start with The Book, then build something small. That’s what worked for me.