Question: does "getting rusty" mean you're getting better or worse at Rust?
Yes.
Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
51–60 of 282 posts
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#52I've enjoyed learning Rust, but I'm at the stage where I'm hitting constant stumbling blocks because of the slightly niche nature of what I'm doing. It's the ugly side of Rust; when you're stuck with a series of problems that you can't solve (or take too long to solve), when there aren't enough people in the community to help you, and you end up being unproductive for a while. Where I've seen small projects to their…
[deleted]
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oof, I got burned by the tokio/futures ecosystem too. It's definitely a frustrating experience. Thank god it was only a pet project with no deadline pressure, cause it's been 6months now and I'm still waiting for stabilization.
I spent two years of my professional career with Rust doing async web services and most of it with tokio/futurrs. First you finally get comfortable with Rust and then you do the learning again with futures... I did it. It paid off. Wrote some fast and stable services with it and it is not that hard when you get to the other side. But for newcomers, be careful with references when using futures and be smart how you us…
I eventually got something working, and it was stupid stupid fast, but it definitely took a lot longer to write than I would've liked.
Just waiting for the features and APIs to finalize and async/await for the ergonomics improvements. I believe in it's potential, but I'm in no hurry to use it again in it's current state.
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#54Can anyone recommend exercises for learning a new language. For example, something like "implement a class with these methods", or implement a function that does this. Something that is realistic, should only take an hour or two to implement for a competent programmer, requires you to learn more complicated features of a language, yet I can finish before getting bored or frustrated?
Rosalind is a good platform to learn a new language.
Not the best to discover the most advanced features, but enough to ensure you know your structures and algorithms.
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends, my biggest struggle right now is with the tokio/futures ecosystem, so I'm on gitter::tokio quite a bit, and have posted once on /r/rust. With patience, I eventually solve many problems, but the lead-time is costly. Plus when I'm doing something wrong in my code, rustc could take over 5 minutes compiling, and then come back complaining. Even when I find someone willing to help me debug, the process takes a…
I think the tokio/async ecosystem just isn't ready for prime time. Hopefully this (and compile times!) get much better.
The issue isn't exactly that it's not ready for prime time, but that it's not ergonomic at the moment. The biggest issue that you have to get used to is that pretty much everything has to be owned data, and no references passed around when constructing Future types. This can feel like it comes into conflict with the poll(&mut self) interface (in 0.1).
Also, I found truly understanding the fact that returning data from functions either must be sized or boxed, no references. Again, the &mut self can come into conflict here. But there are simple tricks for dealing with it, like using inner enums for iterating through a state machine of the future, and using Option where you can take() the value when ready.
You'll see these patterns if you look at the Future library and Tokio impls of many of the core types. So I encourage you to generate docs with `cargo doc` and then click the `src` link on any types you want to understand better. The thing I wish I had internalized more earlier (and have been cleaning up a lot lately), is that "Futures should do no work unless polled". This is easy to mess up and regret later as you might accidentally start a Timer or initiate a connection before polling the Future.
Anyway, hopefully people help out when you ask, though everyone's often busy :)
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#56Rust is one of those languages that I just can't see myself ever working with (I mostly do web dev), but it's a language I am really glad I learned and has made me a better overall developer.
Can you please expand on how it made you a better developer?
It made more conscious about when I was modifying values stored in memory or creating copies those values.
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#57I have been learning Rust on and off this year. I have been writing mostly GO for the past few years, but am moving to coding almost primarily in Rust for any new project, and porting over some older ones. Microservices, Data Layer, etc... Honestly, while not perfect, its one of the most beautiful languages I have ever come across. Plus, I have not enjoyed coding in a language this much in a while.
How does your team (E.g., the people on the hook for reviewing/supporting/contributing to your project) feel about the change?
This is a big difference when moving from Go. A language that nobody calls beautiful, but is very easy for a team to contribute to and support (relative to other languages).
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#58Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else.
We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust with the O'Reilly Rust book. We see real productivity in about two weeks, which is actually faster than it was to ramp them up on our C++ code base. The compiler errors are amazing and it's almost like giving them a built in tutor.
I'm very bullish on Rust becoming the language of choice in the 2020s for everything from operating systems, web services, desktop applications, and more. It's that good.
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#59Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…
Do you use only the O'Reilly book? Or do some grads go and buy a few others?
Re: Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting
#60Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else. We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust…
Do you use only the O'Reilly book? Or do some grads go and buy a few others?
We buy the book for them because we feel it's the best text out there, and they can get the 'Rust Book' for free on Rust's website, so that's two resources for them, plus being able to ask our already ramped up engineers questions.