Is rust the better choice for canister development?

Developers
1

Because of the last dfx update to version 0.8.4 which adds first-class support for rust canisters.

Could be rust the better choice for canister development because of the larger tooling and available libraries etc. ?

What do you think?

1 Like
2

Rust is much better; exactly because of what you explained. Also more likely to find devs in rust than in motoko (which, though, isn’t saying a whole lot…rust devs are also scarce).

3

Very noob and uneducated answer so take it with a grain of salt: I assume Dfinity is going to work on Motoko for many years to come and optimize it to work well with the IC. So while now it may not be the better option it may as well turn out to be down the road. Especially if we manage to build a healthy and active developer community around it.

3 Likes
4

Yes that`s what i think it should be.

1 Like
5

Even though there are definitely more libraries available in Rust, you can’t actually use a good portion of them (at least not right now).

Any library that makes syscalls, e.g. writing to a file, won’t work out of the box on the IC, because IC has its own System API (e.g. files don’t exist). So that actually limits the range of usable libraries by quite a lot.

Just putting that out there.

2 Likes