You’re a CTO / decision maker for a team that is considering to use Rust? Here’s your executive summary for Rust adoption.

What you need to know

• Rust is different to other languages like Go.
• Go focuses on day 1: you have a great experience when starting out and can celebrate some quick wins.
• Rust is the exact opposite: your first impression will probably be irritating. It might be frustrating because you need to adapt your mental model, which can take weeks or months.
• However, in the long run, Rust shows its strengths: stability, fearless concurrency, refactoring is a joy. These are all great things from a business perspective.
• That’s because Rust covers a lot of issues very early on in the development cycle. Issues you’ll run into much later in other languages, but that you’ll still need to deal with at some point:

An inconvenient truth

• To me, there is not one Rust, but two: sync Rust and async Rust.
• Async Rust is more difficult because you’ll need to master concepts like traits (Send , Sync ) and lifetimes (especially 'static) and many crucial parts of that ecosystem are not part of the standard library. As such, the documentation is still lacking, and you might still run into bugs.
• If you build web applications, there’s hardly a way around async Rust, so plan in extra learning time.
• Learn more in my dedicated article here.

Your Team Needs To Be Excited About Rust

• Without excitement, you’re fighting an uphill battle. You don’t want that.

• To find people for your Rust project, hunt for existing knowledge:

  • Look for language proximity to Rust in your team.
    • C++ devs: These folks already know about memory management.
    • Functional programmers (Haskell/Scala/F#): These folks know about algebraic data types, Maybe, Option, Result types
  • Ask around if anyone built a hobby project in Rust.

• When it comes to technology, every team look like this:

  

  Not everyone is an innovator or early adopter. There will be people who are skeptical. Be patient. Allow them to ask questions before the Rust adoption. Run a town hall meeting or a survey. Plan in some extra time for everyone to catch up.

You need to put in the work!

• Let your team do hands-on work. Not just theory, also practice. Courses work well in that context. Let each team member write a few thousand lines of Rust to get comfortable.
• Rustlings is a great resource. It has exercises with tests for learning Rust.