I’ve used Rust professionally for five years now, and it is too hard to give a full answer in any single comment. There are so many reasons. You are right, it is a lot more elegant. You can do things with its type system which you can’t in any other mainstream language, because of ownership. It’s really a life changing experience, so I’d suggest you just try it out, build a project in it, and see what it’s like. You won’t regret it.

I strongly disagree about generics / syntax. IMO they’re fine and you’ll learn to love them.

The high level answer I’ll give is that Rust is a language that is designed from the ground up to not make many sacrifices. You can use it for systems programming where you can’t use a garbage collector, or for high level stuff like an API server. It feels high level while also being as low level as you need it to. Its errors are absolutely fantastic. Same with the tooling and package manager.

You should really just see for yourself.

The main issue for me is the syntax, specifically generic types, traits, and lifetimes.

After working almost exclusively with Go for years, reading it seems unnecessarily demanding.

Like someone else said, this is a complex subject to answer. The syntax looks perplexing and frustrating, until it doesn’t. These days, Rust syntax is nowhere in my thought while coding - it like when you drive, you are thinking about where you want to go rather than about manipulating the controls.

Why should I learn and use rust?

Rust’'s rules are about enforcing memory safety. But it also ends up forcing you to write better programs than what you imagined you could. It’s hard to describe that feeling - you have to experience it. That alone is a good reason to learn it - even if you end up not using it in the future.

Rust’s unique design also leads to many design patterns not normally seen in most other languages. That’s also worth exploring.

I have fallen in love with Go. It feels like ‘home’ to me

That’s a perfectly good thing. It’s hard to find that sweet spot. However, don’t let that stop you from exploring the alternatives. You might find ideas you could use in Go.

Go is a great language. I used it a few times when dealing with bugs in open source programs. And though I never used it besides that, I could spot and fix these easy issues fast.

Rust is not like that. The syntax is a little harder to read and a lot of widely used libraries use complex macros to ease their users lives.

But:
I cannot count the times rust has saved my ass.

Examples:
Sqlx checks my sql files against a local test-db and always errors, when my scripts miss parameters after changing the sql file.
I have to use a complicated mess of an API at work to get the data I need and I now use a 50-60 element enum that tells me exactly, what I got back from the API-calls.

When I write code, it’s typically in Go or Python.

The reason I’m curious to learn Rust is specifically to contribute to existing projects that are written in Rust.

If you’re interested in working on Lemmy code, for example, you’ve gotta learn some Rust to do it.

It looks just about as bad as C++'s template system, minus the latter’s awful compiler errors.

I’d say they’re incomparable. One’s a Turing-complete programming language, the other is not much more powerful than generics in a language like C#. That’s not to say that your impression is incorrect - both are significantly more complex than what Go had for the longest time (no generics), and likely more complex than what Go has now (though I haven’t looked much into Go’s new generics system to be honest).

If you’re looking for a reason to use Rust, I recommend picking it up and doing some projects in it. There are many, many reasons why one would choose Rust for a project (security, correctness, needs to be low level, preference, etc) and many documented scenarios where companies have found switching to Rust to be beneficial to them, but at the end of the day, only you know what your requirements and preferences are.

It seems like you prefer highly readable code. This is a pretty subjective thing though, and you may find that Go is more readable to you than any other language. I would disagree, but again, it’s a matter of preference. For some, C++ is the language they find most readable. Regardless, the only way to know if you’ll like it and want to use it is for you to pick it up and use it, and develop your opinions based on experience. If you find that spending time learning it will be a waste after trying it out for a little bit, then you have your answer.

In purely practical terms, Rust gives more precise resource control (deterministic memory management instead of garbage collection). In language geek terms, Rust has a more precise type system that lets you capture and enforce program invariants at compile time, in ways that Go doesn’t. That makes refactoring more reliable among other things. Is it worth it? That’s a variant of the age old debate between static and dynamic type systems.

I would say language theory is an important branch of CS, that anyone trying to be a strong programmer should know something about, just like they should know how the quicksort algorithm works or that the halting problem is undecidable. If Rust isn’t to your fancy, you might try Haskell, which has a similar (maybe even fancier) type system, but is garbage collected and has a different execution model. Try learnyouahaskell.com for a good tutorial.

Disclosure: I use Haskell but for now haven’t yet used Rust. Rust is interesting, I just haven’t gotten to it yet. I do like Ada.

Every language is just a tool for the job. From what I understand Go is great for multithreaded web or backend applications. Now if you were a game developer you would most likely not be using Go as it is not industry standard and the support just isn’t there. Rust also intrigued me but as my current job is windows only I mostly write code in C# or Powershell.

What I do like about Rust are things like exhaustive matching and memory safety. I dislike cargo for the same reason I don’t like other languages with package management, supply chain security risks.

Pick the best tool for the job and use whatever language you enjoy the most.

Ironically, I learned Rust first, and later looked at Go. I found a lot of the syntax needlessly “different”. That being said, it’s still a decent language. Point being, a lot of the weirdness subsides once you understand why it’s there.

Personally, I don’t actually care about the lifecycle and memory management stuff. What I like about Rust is:

• An enforced error type that is very convenient to use with the ? operator. No more err != nil spam, but same amount of safety
• ADTs with a host of wonderful features, like exhaustive match statements. Go enums are horrendously basic, let’s be honest
• NO NIL!! Non existence is expressed with an Option type that, like the error type, comes with many conveniences
• Generics from the start, meaning you don’t have older code that throws away type safety anywhere
• Traits/Interfaces can be implemented for foreign/external types and types can implement external interfaces (duh)
• Great tooling, good formatting tools, good LSP, that kind of stuff. Golang has that too

Why learn Rust? For the same reason everyone should learn different languages. To learn new concepts and see new perspectives on old problems. It’ll make you a better developer even in your previous languages.

There are no reasons to learn it apart from getting familiar with some of the concepts in it or working on a rust project.