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A half-hour to learn Rust

fasterthanli.me

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Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#191

Post by _nckn »

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.

Try to use that in real world and see if your love still stays put. An hour is not enough to validate Rust.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#192

Post by nobleach »

Animats wrote: post #15

That is the best article on Rust I've ever seen. Better than the Rust book. I've been saying that Rust needed a book that wasn't written by the designers of the language, who are too close to it. Now we have one.

I'd LOVE it if we could get a Why's Poignant Guide To Rust... I find that kind of weird humor helps my mind remember things.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#193

Post by christiansakai »

Animats wrote: post #15

That is the best article on Rust I've ever seen. Better than the Rust book. I've been saying that Rust needed a book that wasn't written by the designers of the language, who are too close to it. Now we have one.

This article is very very basic beginner Rust. You'll be disappointed if you expect to encounter Rust in real world like this article.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#194

Post by nobleach »

Xunjin wrote: post #67
Animats wrote: post #15

That is the best article on Rust I've ever seen. Better than the Rust book. I've been saying that Rust needed a book that wasn't written by the designers of the language, who are too close to it. Now we have one.

Rust Crash Course by Michael Snoyman is great. You can get a free copy at fpcomplete. Did a free course in December with him, and I'm still watching the classes because it has so much great info there. Also I do recommend the Rust Programming, it really teaches you "how/why" use Rust. To conclude, rust-learning (at GitHub) have great links, amazing articles about parts of the language, there is so much knowledge ther…

Link for those interested: https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/10/introducing-rust-crash-...

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#195

Post by kaleidawave »

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 is difficult but the constraints it introduce require more thought of the design of the program.

The article also skims over the single ownership model which is a big difference with Rust. And it does miss about creating macros, cells, threading & mutexes, heap allocated types, unsafe code, Rc, std::mem, and the whole crates and cargo ecosystem. Which is why I think this should have been titled "half-hour introduction to Rust syntax". Hopefully this does bring more people on the Rust train. I think 2021 will be a good year for Rust :)

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#196

Post by throwaway894345 »

the_duke wrote: post #174
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.

You can write Rust code with almost no lifetine annotations. That's heavily dependent on the domain, of course. But for relatively simple function signatures they are usually inferred correctly, and you can often just clone instead of requiring references.

Pretty sure if you’re deserializing a structure with borrowed references you need lifetime annotations. Copying things around to pacify the compiler hardly seems elegant.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#197

Post by throwaway894345 »

nobleach wrote: post #184
the_duke wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write Rust code with almost no lifetine annotations. That's heavily dependent on the domain, of course. But for relatively simple function signatures they are usually inferred correctly, and you can often just clone instead of requiring references.

Yes, you can clone all day long and just reuse variable names as if you were writing JavaScript, but what does that do to your memory allocation?

To be clear, JS doesn’t require cloning because it has a gc. Not sure what you’re getting at with reusing variables names...

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#198

Post by thisisusername »

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…

As another Python programmer I also agree. Rust's features are very mature especially compared to an old dinosaur like C. I only wish its syntax was more like Swift's which is more pleasing to the eyes and was also made by the same guy.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#199

Post by bccdee »

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 was mostly a Python user, and now I primarily write Rust when I can. It's an absolutely gorgeous language, especially for being so practical.

There's a bit of a progression with Rust, where at first you see the examples and you go "this language is so beautiful!" Then you try to write something nontrivial in Rust and you go "wow the compiler will NOT stop yelling at me, how does anyone write anything in this language?" Rust has a fairly austere learning curve in general, and it takes some getting used to.

That passes, though, and then you really do get to experience the elegance and power which sold you on Rust in the first place. There's a period where writing Rust feels substantially slower that writing in anything else, but that passes too.

It really is as good as it sounds, but it might take a while before you're accustomed enough to Rust's paradigm that it feels that way.

Re: A half-hour to learn Rust

#200

Post by harikb »

fasterthanlime wrote: post #190
volta87 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that being able to write down the lifetimes in the language is beautiful. You don't have to do it, but if you want to do it, being able to do so in a way that's verified and enforced by the toolchain beats doing so in a documentation comment. Now every time I read a doc string saying that I need to "deepcopy" something in Python for some API usage pattern to work properly I cringe.

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 parties that there is no threading involved and print would finish before the next use of that string. Yes, I can create a borrow or clone, but having to think of it every single line of code even when there is only one thread of execution is really painful

Edit: I get print is a macro, but imagine a detailed logger for this case.

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