A 30 minute introduction to Rust

A little OT...but what's with Svbtle's apparent default styling of links? There's no indication that any particular word or sentence contains a link, which basically makes those links invisible to readers. Or do lots of people read web articles by randomly hovering the mouse around the text?

But relevant to the OP...I generally try to save useful tutorials like this on my pinboard, which often doesn't pick up the meta-description text. So I double-click to copy the first paragraph and paste it into pinboard...except in the OP, I kept on clicking on text that was hiding links underneath.

It's a strange UI decision, and one that seems to discourage the use of outbound links...if you can't see the links, then what is the purpose of them? For spiders?

> I'd rather stick to C if I need tight memory management, it is way simpler and straight forward.

Well, if you don't want your C to segfault, you have to understand these concepts anyway, they're just implicit to the language. C's memory management may be simple, but it's surely not easy.

> There's no indication that any particular word or sentence contains a link

There is a subtle grey underline, which I'm sure can be nearly invisible depending on your screen.

I think we can be a little bit more charitable towards C++. Modern compilers will let you know if you try to do something as obviously incorrect as returning a pointer to a stack variable.

    $ cat > foo.cpp  int *dangling(void)
    > {
    >     int i = 1234;
    >     return &i;
    > }
    > EOF
    
    $ clang++ -Werror -c foo.cpp
    foo.cpp:4:13: error: address of stack memory associated with local variable 'i'
          returned [-Werror,-Wreturn-stack-address]
        return &i;
                ^
    1 error generated.

Salespeople qualify leads by determining if you're ready to buy or not. If you're not, they stop wasting time on you. The general idea for a quick introduction is to qualify your lead. So this isn't a "introduction to Rust's syntax" it's "an introduction to why you should (or should not) care about Rust."

> since every competent C/C++ programmer knows not to do it.

Everyone knows, yet programs still segfault. The point is that the language helps you be competent. Static analysis is very useful.

> Does Rust really call its threads "green threads"? Green threads have a weird reputation.

I agree. Rust has N:M mapped threads by default, but recently added 1:1 as well.

> it's an attempt at conversational style that doesn't add much.

I happen to write like I talk, it gets good and bad reviews. A more neutral style would be more appropriate if/when this gets pulled into Rust itself, thanks, that's a great point.

> Does the whole concept of Rust concurrency and memory protection boil down to "the language provides an 'unsafe', and then people write libraries to do things with it"?

I think this is an unfair characterization, but I gave it to you, so that's a criticism of me, not you. I tried to point out that unsafe exists for exceptional cases only: it's not something that you need unless you're doing something dangerous for a specific reason. I personally have only ever written unsafe when wrapping something with FFI.

Introductions are hard because you never know how much depth to go into; maybe I should go into these bits a little more in depth.

Thanks for the great feedback. :)