No need for a Pi -- you can play with Rust on your main laptop/desktop, installed in your home directory, and it might be a bit easier and more accessible that way.
A few caveats:
* Rust is getting really big and complicated. The basic borrow checking was pretty neat and accessible (except for hard cases), but a ton of other stuff has been added. Appreciate that getting through it all is difficult, and don't be discouraged. (I think discouragement is one of the biggest barriers to learning a programming topic, for no good reason.)
* Consider starting by writing command-line utilities you would like to have. If you instead decide to start with a GUI UI or full-screen character terminal UI crate (package), you might find that they tend to use a lot of Rust features in their APIs (perhaps necessarily), and you might also have to work around complicated ownership&lifetimes because of the model of the crate. This is an unusual barrier.
* Rust is really a systems programming language. To fully appreciate Rust, you have to need that performance, and know how much more difficult it is to write correct code in C (it's even harder than most C programmers think). But, for Web development, Rust might still come in handy for for high-performance backend work, and possibly later for full-stack (where maybe you won't have to write any JS bits on the frontend, because WASM).
A few caveats:
* Rust is getting really big and complicated. The basic borrow checking was pretty neat and accessible (except for hard cases), but a ton of other stuff has been added. Appreciate that getting through it all is difficult, and don't be discouraged. (I think discouragement is one of the biggest barriers to learning a programming topic, for no good reason.)
* Consider starting by writing command-line utilities you would like to have. If you instead decide to start with a GUI UI or full-screen character terminal UI crate (package), you might find that they tend to use a lot of Rust features in their APIs (perhaps necessarily), and you might also have to work around complicated ownership&lifetimes because of the model of the crate. This is an unusual barrier.
* Rust is really a systems programming language. To fully appreciate Rust, you have to need that performance, and know how much more difficult it is to write correct code in C (it's even harder than most C programmers think). But, for Web development, Rust might still come in handy for for high-performance backend work, and possibly later for full-stack (where maybe you won't have to write any JS bits on the frontend, because WASM).