Programming

Maybe the problem is, that you try to learn and use everything at once. Rust is not easy and it has lot of stuff to learn and get good at. And compared to many languages, Rust has a few set of core features that makes it more complicated to understand and also you need to learn the basics before getting started. So just doing the exercises is not enough. My advice is to write simple programs with a focus of specific set of language features and what you want to accomplish, before doing the more advanced stuff.

The difference to languages like C++ is, that Rust forces you to do the homework before running the program, not after. That is the reason why it looks to be "harder", but I think this is one of the reasons why its so misunderstood. In example if you MUST think about all possible states, variables and errors in a program before it runs, then you have to put so much work for this. In the end, you did all the work and the program should theoretically better than if you did not have. Compare this to other languages, where you can run the program simply by ignoring errors, all states a program can be in and be done in short amount of time. That looks easy. But in reality you didn't do all the work.

Can you provide examples of what you're finding hard?
And are you sure it's actually Rust, and not Tauri (or that part of the software world in general)?

How many years of experience do you have in C++, and which version?

Rust can be a bitch in its syntax, and its borrow checker, but modern professional C++ can be way worse if you use concepts and metaprogramming.

I haven't touched rust in a few years so the cookbook and the language may be different. I agree that the book didn't do a great job of preparing for a real project of any size/complexity, but there are other resources out there worth reading. Reading best practices documents might help some things make sense.

The borrow checker is something you will get used to. Lifetimes is another one that took me a bit to understand. I only ever did a little bit in C and even less in C++, but did have professional experience with Java, Perl, JS, PHP, and more at the time I first started looking into it. I was able to replace some fairly simple production PHP code with rust that ran much more reliably and with fewer resources, but didn't tackle anything huge.

What do you find hard about it?

For me, what made it take so long to learn and really understand was that it's different from most modern programming languages. It's not C, C++, or based on my own experiences, C#, JS, Java, etc. Approaching the language as someone who's really into C# made it difficult to throw away that experience to learn something completely new, whether because I now had to wrap my head around lifetimes or because I can't have one type inherit the fields and methods of another.

Eventually, if you keep sticking to it (and have interest to do so), you'll learn how the language was designed to be used, and why it was designed that way.

Reading source code is your friend, by the way. If you want to learn the language, you should spend at least as much time reading code others have written as you also spend writing code. This can be as simple as "go to definition" on some imported function from a library you're using. Try to understand how that code works, and eventually you'll even begin to form opinions on what works well vs. what doesn't. Heck, you might find yourself opening PRs against something like Tauri in no time.

Rust has a steep learning curve early on. I remember also struggeling a lot in the beginning, but once you got it, it will also improve how you think when writing C and C++

Its more of what do you want out of a compiler.

https://www.manning.com/books/learn-rust-in-a-month-of-lunches

A great analogy for Rust is that of a critical but helpful spouse.

And I kinda agree with that. Maybe a little excessive but when you're done you have a much more likely to not hit a segfault

Yes. Hard that from Lots of people.