April 11, 2026/314 words/2 min read

Learning Rust for No Good Reason

Sometimes interesting is enough.

I find myself circling Rust while having almost no practical need for it.

These days most of the code I write is API glue. The rest tends to be some tiny script or TUI that feels useful for about three evenings before I archive it. None of this needs borrow checking or fearless concurrency, so JavaScript or Go would do. In most cases even Bash would do.

Rust ended up clicking in a way I did not expect, almost annoyingly so. The compiler's strictness feels helpful. It makes me name things properly and work out who owns what before I can overthink the shape of the app.

This is new for me because I am very comfortable living in glue code, where the job is mostly to move data from one shape into another and keep the edge cases from breaking the app. That's all fun, but it doesn't feel like I am learning the material underneath. Rust pulls me one level lower by forcing me to follow ownership and lifetimes myself. It even makes me think about how errors move through the program, another detail I would normally leave to the runtime.

I also like that Rust makes tiny programs feel substantial. A throwaway CLI gets a proper project structure and a compiler that gives helpful errors. The whole thing has weight, as if it could grow if I wanted it to. In most cases it probably will not! Most of my little tools sit there like the rest of the stuff I work on, half useful and mostly forgotten.

Maybe that is why I keep coming back. I don't have a grand plan to become a Rust person or rewrite my current stuff in it. Most of those problems don't need a systems language, and I'm too busy to pretend otherwise. I enjoy being made to think a bit harder than usual.