I started coding in Rust this week, and although the language is very young, I was quickly impressed with how much it does right.

This is a list of aspects of Rust I’ve been impressed with over the past week. I won’t bother listing the language’s main selling points, as they’re already listed on the website. I’m also sure many lists like this exist already, but I’d like to have something I can point to for my own reasons to like Rust.

I’ll also add, as a bit of background, that I was previously coding in Node.js and TypeScript (among others).

• Easy to install
• Easy to uninstall (so very rare in the UNIX world)
• Reasonable Hello, World!
• Official build tool / package manager, Cargo
  • Low barrier to start a new project, cargo new
  • Single step build & run, cargo run
  • Infers author information from git configuration
• Excellent standard library documentation
• Algebraic data types!
• Pattern matching and destructuring
• Tuples
• Iterators
• Unicode char and String
• Immutable by default
• Implicit return / expressions
• Hygienic macros
• FFI examples for Ruby, Python and Node.js in the book
• Simple C FFI
• Built-in Markdown documentation generation (cargo doc)
• Built-in test runner (cargo test)
  • In-module unit tests
  • Documentation tests (examples from documentation are run as tests)
  • Separate integration tests
  • Easy Travis setup
• Usable random, from the rand crate (this is apparently really hard for systems languages)

I think that the overall most appealing aspect of Rust for me is that it’s a systems language that doesn’t feel like a systems language. Using it feels so much more comfortable than writing C or C++.