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The more languages you learn, especially with reusable concepts, the less of a tax it is to learn a new one. As someone who has written C/C++ for over a decade, learning Rust felt very straightforward -- I just had to learn about the borrow checker, and it was fairly straightforward to reason about how it works based on my knowledge of unique pointers in C++.

I certainly don't think C++ is a prerequisite to learning Rust, but I do think your path to deeply understanding Rust will accelerate if you understand C (or specifically, understand pointers and heap allocations). But to each their own!



Learning new languages is certainly useful/important, but time is finite. The idea of learning a certain language as a bridge to another is unrealistic unless one has a _lot_ of time.


I come from Haskell and fought fiercely with the borrow checker for two months. We’re friends now.

I talked to a C programmer who said thinking in lifetimes (when to free()) was second nature, so didn’t even think heavily about it.




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