Hello all,
I am a data center engineer of about 8 years now. I’ve spent the last 3 years or so slowly learning Python(I say slowly not because of my effort, but because learning Python was actually very difficult for me.) I am not an expert in any way shape or form, I understand the concepts of OOP, inheritance, classes, functions, methods, etc and I have found that the python documentation that can be found within the language is usually enough for me to be able to write the programs that I want to write. Very rarely have I had to write programs that have to bypass the GIL, but occasionally, I have created threadpools for applications that are not I/O intensive. What I’m saying is, for most things that I create, performance is enough with Python.
However, I have been inspired by how much love Rust is getting from the people who use Rust. I have tried to find some books for using Rust for network automation and unfortunately I have not been able to find any reputable books.
Most of the “automation” work that I do involves parsing data with regex, restructuring the data, converting the data into a modeled format and transforming something with that data. Does anyone have any common use cases for Rust that might interest me? Has anyone used Rust for network automation tools? With familiarity, can Rust’s intuitiveness match Python’s “from idea to deployment” speed? Or should I only learn Rust if I intend to create applications that need tight performance?
Thank you, great response. Based on your opinion and another, I believe I will focus on learning Go. I mostly need the benefits of compiled languages in order to easily distribute, as well as easier parallelism, as I’ve always found that to be a pain in the ass with Python. Not sure if Threading, Concurrency, or Asyncio are the “best” way to handle threading of non CPU intensive tasks, such as sending a request and waiting for a response. But I know that it seems since Python has taken so long to attempt to allow easier bypassing of the GIL, you get a lot of decent ways of doing something, but no great ways.