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How I went about learning Rust

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Re: How I went about learning Rust

#251

Post by pjmlp »

Ygg2 wrote: post #220
pjmlp wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will debate it is one, yes. Just like being an FP language isn't "like Haskell does it", when I learned FP, Haskell didn't even exist. Try to express Eiffel, CLOS, SELF or BETA in Java. By the way, here is One Weekend Raytracing in Rust, perfectly using OOP with dynamic dispatch and interfaces (sorry traits). https://github.com/pjmlp/RaytracingWeekend-Rust

Ok. But noticed what I said. *Things* that are easy in one OOP should be similarily easy to express in other OOP language. Counter example: Html5 DOM.

Counter example of what?

A graph representation of nodes based on JavaScript object model?

Fine, https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/wasm-bindgen/examples/dom.ht...

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#252

Post by Scarbutt »

mprovost wrote: post #113
zozbot234 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're coming from a NodeJS background, you'll want to pick up an introductory textbook about C as well. Rust implicitly relies quite closely on the C machine model, and introductory books about Rust (such as "The Rust Programming Language") don't do a very good job of conveying the nitty-gritty details of that model to novice coders. This is a pretty nasty pitfall when trying to code in Rust, and it's importan…

I'm self-publishing "Rust From the Ground Up" which takes this approach: each chapter rewrites a classic Unix utility (head, cat, wc, ...) from the original BSD C source into Rust. I find for systems programming it's easier to understand how things work in C, and then teach the idiomatic way of doing it in Rust. C is pretty easy to follow along in "read-only" mode with some explanations. https://rftgu.rs/

Nice, is the BSD C source unchanged in the book?

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#253

Post by adamc »

eklavya wrote: post #239
dllthomas wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's similar, but there are some differences. Notably, my package can implement my trait for your type, while my package (usually? always?) cannot make your type inherit from my virtual base class.

Wrapper classes should be equally good once Valhalla (jdk) lands, without introducing another pointer indirection.

Interesting but Java gets more and more complex in a way that does not make me want to write things in Java.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#254

Post by mprovost »

Scarbutt wrote: post #252
mprovost wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm self-publishing "Rust From the Ground Up" which takes this approach: each chapter rewrites a classic Unix utility (head, cat, wc, ...) from the original BSD C source into Rust. I find for systems programming it's easier to understand how things work in C, and then teach the idiomatic way of doing it in Rust. C is pretty easy to follow along in "read-only" mode with some explanations. https://rftgu.rs/

Nice, is the BSD C source unchanged in the book?

Yes! I use the (final) 4.4 release from 1993. Some were written by Bill Joy! But if you look at the modern OpenBSD or FreeBSD (or MacOS) versions they’re still about 90% unchanged. The older versions are a bit shorter which makes it easier to explain.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#255

Post by chakkepolja »

thejosh wrote: post #43

I tried to pick up Rust a few years ago, but there were too many sharp edges. I thought it was a nice language, but was too early for actual use. I played with some libraries (Apache Arrow, etc) and it was nice. About 2 months ago I wanted to use Arrow within Elixir, which required me to start using Rust again (Elixir uses Rustler to safely convert from Rust Elixir without theoretically crashing the beam). I am amaze…

The person who wrote this blog is really good at C++ and compilers (along with many other things), so I think this would be relatively easier for him.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#256

Post by [deleted] »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

[deleted]

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#257

Post by int_19h »

pimeys wrote: post #226
hyperman1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it was the web-of-pointers strategy I had to unlearn. A child object keeping a pointer to its parent is misery in Rust. It forces you to either make the child completely independent or really prove the parent will be around until the child disappears. 90% of the time this is dumb overhead, but 10% of the time it found a bug in some edge case, so I learned to appreciate it as a tough teacher, and my designs got…

We solved this with flat vectors and just sharing index values in cheap walker objects. It is much nicer to work with compared to arc/weak pointers. Code here: https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/tree/main/libs%2Fda...

How is this fundamentally different from raw pointers?

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#258

Post by bbkane »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #185
Fiahil wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of Rust 1.62, compilation time is no longer a valid criticism. Things have improved so much in the past 2-3 versions, it's no longer slower than C++. Sorry!

>> As of Rust 1.62, compilation time is no longer a valid criticism. Things have improved so much in the past 2-3 versions, it's no longer slower than C++. Sorry! Is there a report or study somewhere that shows how much it has improved? I had heard improving compilation and build time was being worked on, but I don't get to use Rust much in my current work. I would be interested to see how much improvement has been m…

See https://perf.rust-lang.org/compare.html?start=2021-11-11&end...

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#259

Post by cultofmetatron »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

you'll grow more as a developer from rust. Rust will force you to think about things like memory management, safety etc. additionally, it has a rich set of abstractions. rust also has better interop with c and c++. In the long run, you're better off learning rust. You'll encounter a brutal learning curve but once you know it, you'll find yourself able to do very powerful things with ease. especially once you internalize the borrow checker.

Go is a great language for the short term but I don't feel like it brings Anything unique or interesting to the profession. its only real advantage is that its quick to learn but there isn't much substance. Its a great language if you're the type of person who doesn't mind copying large reams of code to change a few lines for a new purpose.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#260

Post by int_19h »

nicoburns wrote: post #144
brobinson wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read about sum types. They exist in Haskell, Rust, OCaml, Typescript, Swift, Kotlin, etc. You are likely only familiar with product types without knowing they're called product types. (Cartesian product) You can have 100% type-safe, guaranteed at compile time code without null that can still represent the absence of data. Once you've used sum types, you feel clumsy when using Javascript, Python, Go, Ruby, C, C++, etc…

Arguably dynamic languages have sum types: every variable is one big sum type with the variants being every other type! I suspect the lack of sum types in many static languages are partially responsible for the popularity of dynamic ones.

Some statically typed languages have union types that are extensible in a similar fashion; e.g. in OCaml:

https://v2.ocaml.org/manual/polyvariant.html

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