For me the killer feature of Rust is its nice broad scope. I've done:
- embedded programs on avr hardware, which is impressive that something like rust can compile down to an 8 bit micro. Doing some sort of crazy map/iterator filter closures and finding the resulting assembly being nice and tight makes me super happy.
- web servers and clients (a scraper that collects scores from a web page and serves its own page of aggregated scores to my family).
- a low level opengl tmux/terminal client (Rust's Enums were a killer feature here)
- a windows GUI program for installing a PC game mod (99% developed on a mac and cross-compiled)
- a cli app to "compile" svgs down to png sprites for a web based game
- a launcher for Emacs that uses native cocoa apis to display a dialog on error
Each of these cases ended up pushing different parts of Rust for me. I would say the killer feature that spans all of those is Cargo and the crates.io registry. There are a ton of very good libraries out there—it feels like the heyday of CPAN or RubyGems to me.
I also quite enjoy how many programming errors Rust finds at compile time. With Rust code I spend way more time fixing compiler errors, but when it compiles I typically don't find a ton of major logic errors. I personally find it extremely rewarding when I get something to compile and then it just works. This happens more in Rust than in other languages I've heavily used.
- embedded programs on avr hardware, which is impressive that something like rust can compile down to an 8 bit micro. Doing some sort of crazy map/iterator filter closures and finding the resulting assembly being nice and tight makes me super happy.
- web servers and clients (a scraper that collects scores from a web page and serves its own page of aggregated scores to my family).
- a low level opengl tmux/terminal client (Rust's Enums were a killer feature here)
- a windows GUI program for installing a PC game mod (99% developed on a mac and cross-compiled)
- a cli app to "compile" svgs down to png sprites for a web based game
- a launcher for Emacs that uses native cocoa apis to display a dialog on error
Each of these cases ended up pushing different parts of Rust for me. I would say the killer feature that spans all of those is Cargo and the crates.io registry. There are a ton of very good libraries out there—it feels like the heyday of CPAN or RubyGems to me.
I also quite enjoy how many programming errors Rust finds at compile time. With Rust code I spend way more time fixing compiler errors, but when it compiles I typically don't find a ton of major logic errors. I personally find it extremely rewarding when I get something to compile and then it just works. This happens more in Rust than in other languages I've heavily used.