A Multimodal Study of Challenges Using Rust

Rust is a programming language that provides strong safety properties, but does so at a usability cost. We conducted an observational study of Rust learners and a thematic analysis of StackOverflow posts about Rust to identify opportunities for improvement in Rust’s usability. Key challenges that we observed included syntactic challenges posed by the ? operator, block-terminal statements, and automatic dereferencing; late delivery of error messages; and the opacity of Rust errors resulting in programmers being unable to identify whether their partial fixes represented progress. We describe a collection of opportunities for improvement that leverage the compiler and the IDE.