Rust is a great language but it really has a lot of up-front costs. Whether you are learning it for the first time, or starting a new project, both. Python is always going to be faster “from idea to deployment.”
I think like the other person said, start with the Rust book. It really is a perfectly good introduction. But what I think you’ll find is if you want to be productive with Rust you will need to get the ground rules down or else you will be constantly tripping on the borrow checker and ownership rules. If you think you are getting somewhere with the book, try rewriting something you’ve done in Python. If that works out, great! If not, it’s OK to accept that Rust might not be worth your time.
Yeah. I think I’ll end up having to do platform-specific ifdefs with either pthreads or threads.h, so I guess I may as well use the much better established pthreads and get macOS support by default. In fact, I just now learned that even glibc didn’t support C11 threads until 2018, according to this https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14092#c10