So is it even worth learning rust?

I would not recommend learning Rust for job opportunities alone. It will not make you happy.

Rust is a language with a lot of interesting aspects whose appreciation will help you enjoy the learning experience. I can only speak for myself, but having learnt Rust has made me a better programmer all around. Or, in career-related terms, you could say because of this I'm no longer a Junior dev.

I'm with u/killercup and u/lfairy on this – short term you're much better off with Java, Python or even Javascript (if you are OK with the horrors of frontend development).

I consider Rust a long term investment – my current job has little to no use for it, but I can carry some techniques over to Java. And who knows what will be in 10 years.

I agree with u/killercup – if you want a job, then learn something mainstream like Java or Python.

Rust is a language with a particular niche. Most problems in industry can deal with the latency of garbage collection, or the occasional NullPointerException or data race. I love it, personally, but accept that it won't be used everywhere.

I'm the wrong person to ask as I learn languages for fun but I'd say it is. The borrow checker can help you see the lifetimes of other variables when using other languages etc.

I would agree with u/killercup: Rust isn't yet a language for job opportunities.

Most of my 'work/jobs' are in other languages, but my learning experience with Rust has still improved my own skills as a developer-- but that learning experience was much more than learning the language (or even the platform).

I have a much better understanding of ownership, memory management, and costs that's improved my code/design in other languages. I didn't expect it to be so prominent, but I actually had some non-Rust coworkers notice the improvement. (Not that my code was bad before, but how their code wasn't up to par anymore).

I don't really know how to explain it, but a lot of it came from reading discussions/decisions. Getting a sense of why a decision was made, how it compares (advantages/disadvantages) to other languages, and where/when improvement can be made. If you're solely learning development for a paycheck, those things may not be as useful to know-- but I'd definitely recommend Rust if you're trying to learn to be a better developer, in general.

I've had three problems, after learning Rust:

1. I really miss Rust's enums-- especially the ability to associate data with it.
2. Some of my worker environments are still in the 'OOP Everything' phase.
3. I keep typing let var = ...; in languages that don't support it.

i use it because i need it at work. also it's fun.

I found that the #rust- channels on mozillas irc network helped a lot. Check out #rust and #rust-beginners on irc.mozilla.org

Link for web interface in case you don't have a client installed: https://client00.chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mozilla.org&channel=%23rust-beginners

At least if I were running a company, I would want to ensure that all new projects are written in Rust and that existing projects think seriously about integrating and converting to Rust. I know I'm not alone in this idea considering companies like Dropbox did exactly.

I don't think getting Rust talent is particularly hard either if you actually reach out to the community to fill positions, versus hiding the job position behind an automated resume form submission system that will dispose 99% of talent into File 13.

I'm having a very difficult time finding any legitimate practical uses of rust.

How so? Couldn't you, at the very least, use Rust whenever you otherwise would have used C or C++?

I would really like to

Then learn Rust :)

Is this language meant as a science experiment?

Yes, as well as a practical language. Mozilla is investing heavily in Rust both by developing the language and by using it in Firefox, and there's already Rust components in Firefox today. It's designed to efficiently solve the types of problems Firefox has. In fact, check back at all the security vulnerabilities, most of them would have been avoided had they used Rust (buffet overruns, use after free, etc).

However, it's a new language, so few companies have switched to it. However, there are real people building real things in Rust. In fact, I'm building my current side project in Rust, which I hope to earn real money with.

I fear that after I put too many hours in learning rust, it will never amount to a good job opportunity

As others have said, Rust will make you a better programmer.

I'm having a very difficult time finding any legitimate practical uses of rust.

I'm basically replacing my usage of Go with Rust because I've had concurrency errors with Go (which is its forte) that would have been caught with Rust that have cost me lots of time debugging. I feel like Rust is worth the time investment, and it's honestly not that hard once you understand the borrow checker. When I started learning, I had tons of compiler problems, but now I don't have them nearly as often, and the ones I do get tend to highlight actual problems.

Even if you never use Rust, I think you'll be better off for the time investment. As a manager that's involved in hiring at my company, listing Rust as a proficient language would definitely get my attention even though we don't use it at my workplace and likely never will.

Rust fills an important niche in a way no other language currently can - memory and type safe, massively concurrent, roughly as fast as C, easily embeddable in other languages' FFI, and all with no garbage collection. No other language (maybe except Ada) has all of that right now.

Over time it will begin replacing C, C++, Java, and Go for anything Rust has mature enough libraries for (and that especially benefits from Rust's unique combination of advantages). But it's still early in the game, it just stabilized at version 1.0 last year, and will take a few more years to reach, say, Go's current level of popularity where there are a lot of jobs for it.

It's definitely worth learning if only to see what a 21st century programming language done right looks like. But there's not a huge sense of urgency career-wise, don't feel like you need to need to master the whole language in 3 months or miss out on great jobs. Just play with it in your spare time, make or contribute to cool things, and you'll be in good shape when more jobs start appearing for Rust.