A half-hour to learn Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#211

Post by ibraheemdev » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

EugeneOZ wrote: post #54

tgv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it only covers the very basics. Disclaimer: I've only scrolled through it, but the code snippets are all small. It does show an admirable amount of Rust's syntax, but it's not very discoverable, whereas the book is reasonably well structured (although not for novices, who have forgotten a specific term). The link also doesn't deal with larger programs: there's not an Rc on the page, let alone something like an Ar…

It's your opinion and I'm not arguing: a lot of people love the Rust book, but some (including me) simply can’t read it because of the style of writing and cases when you discover some interesting and deep topic but the author just gives 1 example in 5-10 lines of code and that's all. I think that things like Mutexes or Boxes are deep enough to have 30-50 pages dedicated to them, and I can say this not only about Mut…

I highly recommend Jon Gjenset's streams for more advanced Rust concepts like lifetimes or interior mutability. He goes into depth explaining how they work, what kinds of problems they solve, and gives tons of great examples.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#212

Post by ufmace » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

malwrar wrote: post #132

This is precisely what I was looking for when I searched for “Rust for C++ programmers” in the past. I love the Rust book, but I’ve always thought the common focus on accessibility for newbie programmers made it feel tedious for those who are more seasoned. I’d love to see more writing like this, maybe even for other things like libraries!

I've found it's generally really tough to find guides for getting into new languages that are written for experienced programmers who don't know that language yet. Everything seems to be written for complete newbies, or be a dense reference that assumes you know almost everything already.

It's a bit annoying, but not much to do except slog through the guides and try to write a few programs.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#213

Post by CRConrad » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

artursapek wrote: post #165

nitred wrote: post #161

As a Python programmer with limited experience with compiled languages, Rust code was more intimidating to read or look at than C++, Java or Go. After only an hour, I am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. I cannot believe that I am smitten by Rust within an hour. Its features seem, obvious. My experience with Go was…

> I cannot believe that I am smitten by Rust within an hour This has been my, and a lot of my colleagues', experience with Rust. Never have I seen people fall in love with a programming language so strongly. And the love lasts for a long time.

Do you know any Object Pascal programmers?

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#214

Post by globuous » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

ithrow wrote: post #171

nitred wrote: post #161

As a Python programmer with limited experience with compiled languages, Rust code was more intimidating to read or look at than C++, Java or Go. After only an hour, I am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. I cannot believe that I am smitten by Rust within an hour. Its features seem, obvious. My experience with Go was…

am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. All those lifetime annotations are not sheer beauty or pretty, sure they are necessary but not nice to look at if you are comparing it to a higher level language.

Except from that though, it really looks like ocaml, which really makes me want to look into rust a little bit more :)

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#215

Post by fasterthanlime » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

globuous wrote: post #214

ithrow wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. All those lifetime annotations are not sheer beauty or pretty, sure they are necessary but not nice to look at if you are comparing it to a higher level language.

Except from that though, it really looks like ocaml, which really makes me want to look into rust a little bit more :)

Yup, strong similarities there, since the original Rust compiler was implemented in OCaml :)

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#216

Post by fasterthanlime » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

harikb wrote: post #200

fasterthanlime wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the things that get me about Rust discourse: it seems that "Rust is pain in exchange for performance" is a common misconception. Rust is discipline in exchange for performance and correctness . A GC lets you be relatively worry-free as far as memory leaks go (and even then..) but it doesn't prevent a lot of the correctness problems the borrow checker would. With a checker you're forced to think: do I re…

While I get the point about data-races, a “GC” doesn’t make/help you leak memory - you have simply postponed the free to a later point in time. Assume you had some code that takes a file name and calls open on it. One day you decide you want to print that filename before you open it. Naive code will cause the name to “move” to print and unusable to the open in next line. Even though it is perfectly understood by all…

I'd argue the exact opposite. Languages that don't have a concept of ownership, and a borrow checker, and don't explicitly say if they want ownership, a reference, or a mutable reference, force you to keep all of these details in your head.

Here, if I have a `&T` and I try to call a function that has a `&mut T`, the compiler will tell me that's not gonna work - and then I can pick whether I want my function to take a `&mut T`, or if I want to make a clone and modify that, etc.

There's a learning curve, it's a set of habits to adopt, but once you embrace it it's really hard to go back to languages that don't have it! (See the rest of the comments for testimonials)

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#217

Post by l00sed » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

I've mostly used web-specialized programming languages like JavaScript and PHP, and some Python. Some of the unique characteristics of Rust have been trickier for me to pick up.

This looks like a fun and useful article, but I'd also recommend Rustlings to anyone interested in learning Rust.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#218

Post by fasterthanlime » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

kaleidawave wrote: post #195

Was initially sceptical to this but after skimming think this is actually a very good introduction. I do like the brevity of it compared to the walls of text in the official rust one. Although this does give an illusion that Rust is very simple/easy to learn but any beginner will find that anything more than "Hello World" or "2 + 4" is 10x more difficult than writing in a interpreted language. Not because Rust syntax…

Since a lot of folks take issue with the article's title, think of it as "If you had only a half hour to learn Rust, here's what I'd tell you".

If you have more, do engage in a joust^W friendly collaboration with the compiler, which will get you quite far since diagnostics are a first-class feature :)

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#219

Post by cute_boi » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

christiansakai wrote: post #188

nitred wrote: post #161

As a Python programmer with limited experience with compiled languages, Rust code was more intimidating to read or look at than C++, Java or Go. After only an hour, I am overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and mature design of this language - it almost reads like Python or as well as any compiled language can. I cannot believe that I am smitten by Rust within an hour. Its features seem, obvious. My experience with Go was…

Rust makes hard things easy and easy things hard. Also reading Python code is easier (less syntax noise) on the eyes. The article above is very beginner Rust, and I won't rely on that to look at actual Rust code in the wild. If you want to take a look at what actual Rust code in the wild, take for example, a web server Actix, and try to figure out what the documentation says.

"Rust makes hard things easy and easy things hard."

Disagree here. Like article Rust 2018 is very nice and ergonomic. Iterators, Lifetime Elision etc are nice to work.

Regarding noise many people consider those noise but I find noises like return types etc very useful. Because I can be sure the return type. Regarding actual code actix doesn't look that bad from examples also.

I use warp and its pleasant to work. The only thing I hate is compilation time other than that I don't think I have any major criticism against rust. But compilation time is near to cpp etc so ...

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#220

Post by majewsky » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

pddpro wrote: post #147

axihack wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with me, to learn anything I need to write it down, possibly several times.

Have you tried Anki or similar Spaced Repetition System?

SRS is really good for learning small, compartmentalized knowledge items. Its usefulness degrades quickly when you move from knowledge to concepts. I'm currently learning Japanese and using several SRS tools to do so. The ones that work the best are for characters and vocabulary. I also use one for grammar, which is okay-ish but doesn't translate as well to the SRS format.

So in the context of programming languages, SRS might work if you need to memorize method names or method signatures (though I don't see why that is needed in the age of autocompletion and instant lookups from inside the text editor), but not so much for fundamental language concepts (like "how do lifetimes interact with the borrow checker").