Rust Forces You to Think — Sometimes Too Much

If you’ve ever written a few hundred lines of Rust, you’ve probably muttered something like: “Why can’t I just return this value from the function?” Or maybe: “The borrow checker is angry again. I need a coffee.” Rust is a powerhouse in modern systems programming. It’s memory-safe, blazing fast, and built for the long haul.

But it comes with a catch: it forces you to think — a lot. For many teams, that cognitive load can outweigh the benefits. Let’s dive into why.

The Gift and Curse of Explicitness Rust lays everything bare. You’re in control of:

Ownership: Who owns what data?
Lifetimes: How long does that data live?
Borrowing: Who can access it, and how?
Mutability: Can it change?
Thread safety: Is it safe across threads?
Error propagation: How do errors flow?

This explicitness prevents mistakes. You can’t accidentally mutate shared state or trigger a race condition. The compiler will catch it — often with a 15-line error message and a link to a tutorial. That’s incredible… until your product manager is breathing down your neck for a feature by Friday. In Rust, even small changes feel like a debate with the compiler. Yes, the code ends up rock-solid, but it takes longer to write, and onboarding new developers is no walk in the park.

Rust Makes You an Engineer. Go Lets You Be a Builder. Rust assumes you want to model the world with precision. Its type system is so expressive you could encode an entire state machine if you wanted to. That’s perfect for projects like:

Compilers
Databases
Operating system kernels

But what if you’re building a REST API or a CLI tool? Do you really need to wrap your Result<Option<T>> in a custom error trait with five layers of lifetimes? Probably not. Go, on the other hand, says: “Just get it done.” It’s less about perfection and more about shipping. For many teams, that’s the difference between delivering on time and getting stuck in a Rust-induced design spiral.

The “Think Tax” Is Real Every decision in Rust demands precision, and that can be exhausting:

Should this struct own the data or borrow it?
Do I need this lifetime annotation?
Enum or trait object?
Can I use async here? Wait, is this Future Send + Sync?

Rust rewards clear, deliberate architecture — but it punishes quick iteration. Prototyping in Rust often means understanding the full shape of your system upfront. For startups or teams moving fast, this “think tax” can crush velocity.

Collaboration Can Turn Into Friction Rust enthusiasts adore the language. But what about junior engineers? Or cross-functional teams? When adding a simple logging statement requires understanding lifetimes, you’ve got a problem. Teams often report:

Longer onboarding times
Slower pull request reviews
“Only Alice can touch the Rust codebase…”

That’s a bottleneck. It’s not sustainable for teams that need to scale or move quickly.

Sometimes, You Just Want to Build There’s a reason why so many infrastructure tools are written in Rust for its speed and safety, then wrapped in Go or Python for everyday use. Rust shines in critical, high-stakes systems. But sometimes, you don’t need a precision-crafted samurai sword — you just need a hammer. And Rust can make even hammers feel complicated.

It’s Not About Rust Being “Bad” Let’s be clear: Rust is brilliant. It’s one of the most important languages of our time, pushing the boundaries of what safe, high-performance code can do. But it’s not always the right tool for the job. If your team:

Prioritizes rapid iteration
Has developers with mixed experience levels
Needs to ship early and refactor later

Then a language that demands deep thought about every byte might not be the best starting point. Use Rust when precision and safety are non-negotiable. Avoid it when it slows you down.

Rust forces you to think, and that’s its greatest strength — and its biggest drawback. Choose wisely.

Read the full article here: https://codingplainenglish.medium.com/rust-forces-you-to-think-sometimes-too-much-8978f9770dc2