Rust is not harder than other languages

Prelude

Let’s get one thing straight: Rust isn’t inherently harder than other programming languages. Sure, that might sound a bit clickbaity, but stick with me here.

Rust has a reputation for being "difficult," but I think that label is unfair, or at least incomplete. Most of this perception comes from the learning curve when first picking up the language. And yes, Rust can be harder to grasp, especially for newcomers to programming. But that’s only part of the story.

When we talk about a language’s difficulty, we tend to focus on the initial learning phase. What we often overlook is that every language comes with its own set of challenges, many of which emerge later, particularly at runtime. Rust shifts much of that complexity to compile-time, ensuring that once your code runs, it does so with fewer surprises. Other languages might seem easier upfront but can hit you with difficult debugging sessions, performance issues, or unexpected runtime failures down the line which makes them in this sense harder than Rust.

The honesty of Rust

If you've spent any time around programmers, you've probably heard it: "Rust is hard." People talk about struggling with the borrow checker, wrestling with lifetimes, and fighting the compiler at every step. And sure, Rust can be demanding. It makes you be explicit about ownership, lifetimes, and error handling in ways that other languages let you gloss over.

But here’s the real question: Is Rust actually harder? Or is it just more honest about the complexity that exists in programming?

Most languages start off easy. They let you write code quickly, without asking too many questions. You don’t have to think about memory ownership. You don’t have to worry about whether an error was handled properly. If you want to share data between threads, sure, go ahead, no one’s stopping you.

And then, inevitably, the problems start showing up.

When “easy” becomes hard

In C or C++, it might start as a simple pointer bug. Somewhere deep in your program, a reference is dangling, pointing to memory that’s already been freed. Everything seems fine at first, until it’s not. Maybe the bug lurks unnoticed for months, only showing up in specific conditions. Then, out of nowhere, your program crashes. You dig through logs, add print statements, spend hours tracing through the code, only to realize you freed that memory five function calls ago.

In Java, maybe it’s a NullPointerException that wasn’t supposed to happen. A function call fails because an object you assumed was always there... wasn’t. Now you’re sifting through stack traces, trying to figure out which part of the program let a null slip through.

Or maybe you’re using Go, happily spinning up goroutines, thinking concurrency is easy, until you start seeing strange data inconsistencies. Turns out, your goroutines are stepping on each other’s toes, modifying shared state in unexpected ways. You forgot to use a lock. Now you're debugging a race condition that only appears once every few hundred runs, and the best tool you have is Go’s runtime race detector, if you even remembered to enable it.

These problems all have something in common: They’re not things you think about all the time while writing code (and even if, no human can be 100% aware of all the pitfalls). They’re things that come back to bite you later, when you least expect it. They make debugging a nightmare. They make production failures inevitable. They turn languages that felt "easy" at first into painful, unpredictable experiences over time.

Pay upfront, not later

Rust doesn’t allow these kinds of mistakes to sneak through. Not because it’s trying to be difficult, but because it forces you to acknowledge complexity before your program runs, not after.

You cannot dereference a null pointer in Rust, because Rust doesn’t have null pointers. Instead, you use an Option<T>, and the compiler makes sure you handle the case where the value might not exist. It doesn’t let you "forget" to check, because forgetting isn’t an option.

You cannot introduce data races in Rust, because the compiler ensures that if multiple threads are accessing data, they’re doing it safely. Either you have exclusive access, or you don’t. If you don’t follow the rules, the code doesn’t compile.

You cannot use memory after it’s been freed, because Rust tracks ownership and ensures references never outlive their data. If you try, the compiler stops you.

At first, this feels frustrating. It feels like Rust is constantly in your way, blocking you from writing code that "should just work." But what it’s really doing is forcing you to handle problems now, rather than six months down the line when your program crashes in production.

And this is where the shift happens. Once you start thinking the way Rust forces you to think, you realize something: The problems Rust makes you deal with were always there, you just weren’t confronting them yet because other languages were lying to you about complexity.

The big lie

The biggest misconception about Rust is that it’s "harder" than other languages. But that’s only true if you measure difficulty by how fast you can start writing code. If you measure difficulty by how long it takes to debug, maintain, and make a system reliable, the playing field levels out.

Other languages defer complexity. They let you write something quickly, but they don’t prevent you from making fundamental mistakes. Instead, they let those mistakes sit in your code like ticking time bombs, waiting to explode when the conditions are just right.

Rust doesn’t let you ignore those problems. It won’t let you write unsafe memory access. It won’t let you create race conditions. It won’t let you forget to handle an error.

It’s not harder. It’s just stricter.

And once you accept that, you start seeing the trade-off clearly: In Rust, the compiler is your worst enemy at first, but later, it’s your best friend. You spend more time upfront thinking about ownership, borrowing, and error handling, but you spend way less time debugging crashes, tracking down memory leaks, or figuring out why your program behaves unpredictably in production.

Rust isn’t fighting you. It’s fighting the future version of you who doesn’t want to spend an entire weekend debugging. It’s saving you from the inevitable pain of runtime errors. It’s making sure that when your program compiles, you can trust it.

Tl;dr

In C++, the pain comes when you forget to free memory. The dreaded memory leaks or segmentation faults come knocking, and you spend hours debugging. In Java, you’re caught off guard when you forget to close a resource. Your database connections hang, and your application eventually grinds to a halt. In Rust, the language bites when you forget to handle an error. The compiler doesn’t let you sweep mistakes under the rug. It forces you to acknowledge and deal with them.

See the pattern? Every language has its challenges, and they manifest differently. Rust’s focus on safety and correctness makes it feel stricter, but it doesn’t make it harder. In fact, Rust’s strictness often prevents the kinds of catastrophic bugs that sneak into programs written in other languages.

The frustration isn’t about difficulty, it’s about unfamiliarity. When learning something new, we often confuse “different” with “hard.” Rust asks us to approach problems from a different perspective, emphasizing ownership, borrowing, and error handling. Once you internalize these concepts, you realize they’re not hurdles, they’re features that make your code safer and more robust.

So, no, Rust isn’t harder. It’s just different. And once you embrace that difference, you might even find it’s easier in the long run.