Hey!
I’m a professional software engineer with several years of experience using Rust. Unfortunately I don’t really have the time to contribute to Lemmy directly myself, but I love teaching other people Rust so if:
- You are curious about Rust and why you should even learn it
- You are trying to learn Rust but maybe having a hard time
- You are wondering where to start
- You ran into some specific issue
… or anything to do with Rust really, then feel free to ask in the comments or shoot me a PM 🙂
Thanks so very much. Very informative and encouraging. As a mainly TypeScript developer whose only done some dabbing in C, bash, and python, I’ve been looking for a language that’s a bit more abstracted than C, but not so pigeonholed into specific use cases like Golang (I’m still developing an opinion on Golang, not sure how I feel about it).
Rust so far has appeared like quite a beautiful language and the compiler in particular is the best I’ve ever seen in terms of helpful error/warning messages!
I’m sure I’ll have my small complaints as I struggle to get good at Rust in the near future, but I think this is going to be my go to back end language for some time.
I have plans to eventually convert the C code of the terminal based browser, links, to a Rust project to learn more about how a very basic browser is built. I’d also like to do the same for the TUI system monitoring tool btop, which is written in C++.
I think just attempting those two “rewrite it in Rust” projects, once I have other smaller projects under my belt, will probably give me a good understanding not only of Rust, but also aspects of the HTTP/HTTPS protocols and systems programming not commonly encountered in the field of web development.
Last question, I promise, lol. But what do you make of this plan? Are their any caveats or concerns I should be made aware of in regards to this endeavor?
Again, thanks for everything!
I don’t have concrete experience with Go but I’ve read enough about the language to form an armchair opinion. If you ask me, it seems pretty bad. It’s like you just took C and you threw a garbage collector and an async runtime on top and called it a day. No lessons learned from any of the 40 years prior of programming language theory, just C with a garbage collector. I think the only reason anyone is using Go is because it’s Google and they pushed it a lot. If someone made Go today and wasn’t a billion-dollar corporation and tried to convince people to use it, nobody would use it.
I usually use reqwest for HTTP request stuff. But if your goal is to learn about more low level stuff, you might want to use a lower level library like hyper or even just only using the stuff in the standard library.
I’m a big fan of bottom, which is a TUI resource monitor. Maybe you’ll get some inspiration from there.
I can’t really think of any problems. I think it sounds like a good idea to build some concrete stuff and see what you run into. Just realize that it might take a while before you get used to writing idiomatic Rust code, so don’t expect your first project to be your prettiest work… 😅
Definitely. Okay, that’s about all I have to ask now. I’m bookmarking this thread though to refer back to. You’ve given me some great insights and resources, and have also pointed me in the right direction going forward.
For now I’ll be just making my way through the Book. I also have Programming Rust, by O’Reilly, Command Line Rust by O’Reilly, and Rust for Rustaceans to reference along with the plethora of online resources.
I might PM you some time in the future (if that’s okay) should I get stuck on something I can’t figure out through the usual means (i.e. documentation, stack overflow, etc.).
Again, can’t thank you enough for the help. Cheers!
There’s also zero2prod.com which is really nice as well. There’s even a free sample of the book online.
Feel free to but also consider just posting a thread here so others can also see and learn 🙂. Just be sure to @ me to make sure I see it.