Folks, I need a hobby. I’m a C programmer who has lost his passion for programming, it seems. I’ve decided to try to spark my passion again by going back to the basics, perhaps by creating a programming tutorial Wikibook, for modern applications.
The trouble is, I cannot decide if I should make C or Rust my programming language of choice.
I use C all the time, and have barely any experience in Rust.
Do I go with ol’ reliable and risk being outdated in a few years, or go with the new language and risk being too niche and unpopular?
Zig could use your help I think. Give it a look
Rust is definitely not new and niche anymore, its the most popular language in the StackOverflow surveys.
A C book feels dated at this point, there are very strong recommendations that C is to be phased out in favor of memory safe languages. But people have been signalling the death of C for decades, so it probably has a few more years left.
A good C book on how to write memory safe C would be useful. Its been tried many times, but newcomers to C still seem to struggle with allocation and freeing, and thread safety.
Imo Rust already has the perfect book. I would make a resource for C developers. Especially since you know C already.
I don’t see how that is relevant? You’re already familiar with C, so writing about C does not influence whether you will be outdated in a few years. Learning and writing about Rust could be something that becomes useful, but not necessarily practically - it depends on what you will do in the future.
If you feel you lost your passion, I would suggest learning and experimenting with Rust. It’s different, so may be interesting and thought provoking to learn.
Writing down what you know about C may also be worthwhile, good, or produce a good resource, but I don’t see it as much or like as sparking lost interest and passion. If that is actually your goal (you only asked about future relevancy in the end).
Do both but only publish the C tutorial. Only do a Rust translation as a draft so you can learn Rust. It would be wildly irresponsible to publish the Rust translation when its the first time you’ve written Rust.
