To preface, I don’t know Rust. Just looking at that code, that stuff has references to memory. In what world is a reference pointer not lower level?
That seems like a much bigger minefield, but I’d be happy to be educated on this. I’d ask that part of that education include why I’d ever introduce this class of problems into web development.
I think that's the question most people starting to learn Rust ask. The answer is a bit hairy because of how much modern garbage-collected languages normalized data sharing. Whether you're writing Ruby or Java or C# or Python, you can always do `a = BigStruct(); a.name = 'tiny struct'`.
Rust is the first mainstream language that looks at this code and says "Hold on, are you the only one modifying `a.name`?" And the intimidating part is not the question. The question is not for you. The intimidating part is that the Rust compiler asks itself the question, and it always knows the correct answer.
What the Rust compiler is looking at is the same thing the senior programmers are looking at during code reviews at your company. The people who know who should own which data. In C, once you `malloc` a struct someone has to know to `free` it. That's the rule. You acquire a resource? You're in charge of releasing it. Or at least passing the responsibility of freeing it over to someone else.
Rustc is the ultimate code reviewer. Yes, it's super pedantic, but also, hey, it can take any amount of insults you can throw at it and still thrive. If you run out of things to call it and the code still doesn't compile, guess what, the problem is probably on your side.
I repeat, Rustc is the perfect code reviewer you could ask for. And it's available 24/7. Compilation speeds are not very fast? Ok. Compare them to code review times from your peers when using a lesser language. 10 seconds for an incremental compile doesn't seem so bad when the alternative is to get instant feedback and a comment 16 hours later that you missed an edge case.
Sorry for the big post. Thanks if you read the whole thing; kudos if you scrolled straight down. Be kind, work hard, and good things will happen.
That seems like a much bigger minefield, but I’d be happy to be educated on this. I’d ask that part of that education include why I’d ever introduce this class of problems into web development.