Rust beginner notes & questions

I honestly wish I could do exactly that, but I don't use Rust enough to really contribute meaningfully. I've dabbled with it just long enough to determine that it won't help me in any future projects.

Right now, for the kind of work I'm doing, the runtime overhead of C# for me is relatively unimportant compared to its productivity, which is the best of any language I've personally used. My next step up would be switching to F# on dotnet core, as that would both boost my productivity and performance significantly. The extra 20%-50% runtime performance from Rust just isn't worth it compared to the drop in productivity.

For example, Rust Windows interop is... not pretty right now. There just isn't the same kind of pre-packaged, ready-to-use wrappers around the Win32 APIs that C# has. Does it have the ability to call COM yet? DCOM+? Can you create a socket server with Active Directory Kerberos authentication? Can I validate a certificate against the machine trust store? Last time I checked, there were blocking issues for most of my use-cases, and to be honest I gave up after getting bogged down in all the niggling little issues related to UCS-16 string handling.

At the end of the day, 90% of desktops are still Windows, and well over 50% of all enterprise servers run it too. Rust is very Linux/POSIX centric. All the performance or safety in the world doesn't help if I can't get off the ground and make productive progress on a useful project...

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