Why Every Web Developer Should Learn a Systems Language

For most of my career, I've lived in the world of JavaScript and TypeScript. High-level, garbage-collected, forgiving. Then I started learning Rust, and it fundamentally changed how I think about code — even the JavaScript I write.

The Comfort Zone Problem

Web development tools are incredibly productive. You can go from idea to deployed product in hours. But this productivity comes with abstractions that hide what's actually happening on the machine.

When everything is an object, memory is managed for you, and the runtime handles concurrency, it's easy to write code that "works" but performs terribly under load.

What Rust Taught Me

1. Think About Ownership

In Rust, every value has exactly one owner. When I came back to JavaScript after months of Rust, I started naturally thinking about who "owns" a piece of data. This led to cleaner state management, fewer unnecessary copies, and more predictable data flow.

2. Errors Are Data

Rust's Result type forces you to handle errors explicitly. No exceptions flying across call stacks. Bringing this mindset to TypeScript, I started using discriminated unions and explicit error returns instead of try-catch everywhere.

3. Performance Is a Feature

When you've manually optimized memory layouts and squeezed nanoseconds out of hot paths, you develop an intuition for performance that transfers to any language. You start questioning whether that .map().filter().reduce() chain really needs to iterate three times.

Practical Applications

Learning Rust isn't just academic. WebAssembly lets you run Rust in the browser for performance-critical tasks. Tools like SWC (Rust-based JavaScript compiler) and Turbopack show that the web ecosystem itself is being rebuilt in systems languages.

Getting Started

You don't need to become a Rust expert. Even working through "The Book" and building a small CLI tool will shift your perspective. The investment pays dividends across every language you touch afterward.