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?
One of rusts biggest issues ATM is a less mature eco system. Especially when compared to something as old as python. Rust does have a light stdlib compared to other languages as well and leans more heavily on its ecosystem to fill the gaps. But common things are already well established and mature and the whole ecosystem is coming along quite well.
Currently the biggest issues are the more fringe areas, like libraries for specific APIs or services or areas people have not quite covered yet. But these are fairly quickly lessening as people write libraries as they need them to fill the gaps. I would say its ecosystem is most there, at least enough for most projects now.
And IMO rust has some very nice ergonomics for some libraries - such as json de/serialization that just don’t/cannot exist in other languages.