[uvas_pasas_per]

I started a new project recently and chose C++ because I wanted cross platform, and a language that let me write the highest performance code I could imagine. C is so lacking in abstractions, I don't think I can deal with it. But C++ is such a pain, I keep looking at Rust and feeling temptation. I'm doing some number crunching, and geometric algorithms, among other things. Not sure if Rust is as good as C++ there.

[tialaramex]

I'm the wrong person to ask probably because for me Rust seemed like home almost immediately and that's not most people's reaction.

The brute optimisation for Rust is being done by LLVM, just like if you used Clang to compile C++, so your pure number crunching ought to be fine. If anything you may find it's easier to end up correctly expressing the thing you meant with good performance in Rust. If you rely on a C++ library of geometric algorithms, clearly "I can't find an equivalent in Rust" would be a showstopper and so it's worth stopping past crates.io to try a few searches for whatever keywords are in your head

Also, if you know that learning new stuff fogs up your process, you might not want to try to both learn Rust and work on this novel project simultaneously. Some people thrive pairing learning a language with a new project, others hate that and would rather pick, either do something old in a new language, or do something new in an existing one.

If you decide this isn't the right time but keep feeling a twinge, I encourage you to try it for something else, not everybody is going to like Rust, but it's a rare C++ programmer who spends serious time learning Rust and then decides there was nothing they valued from the experience -- particularly if you have no experience in an ML (F# or Ocaml are modern examples)

[uvas_pasas_per]

Thanks. I've learned a lot of languages and enjoy doing it, especially when much of it is a step up, so not a problem there. I may need to just dive in and try it out on a larger project. It was only after doing that with C++ where I really understood what I liked and what I didn't. A lot of the latter is the tooling/IDEs, which doesn't show up reading about the language. One thing I'm not sure about with Rust is porting a UI class hierarchy from C++. Base class `View`, sub classes `Button`, `VStack`, `TextField`, etc. I see how to replace virtual functions with a trait and impls for the various types. But for stuff (fields or methods) shared in the base class, this looks like one area where Rust is uglier than C++.