So, Rust is stable and has 1.x on it’s name. And now I’m playing with it as there is no more syntax breaking changes. And it is being a lot of FUN!
This blog post is an attempt to write up many of the reasons I’m liking the language and the community.
Being exposed to lower level concepts
I’ve been on web development for a while already. Working on Garbage Collected languages under the HTTP Request Response cycle, both on the client side and the backend means that many of the times I barely need to worry about memory stuff.
Having to learn about differences between having a value on the Heap or the Stack is something new to me. And it is really fun. Knowing that there are different allocation and dis-allocation times and how dependent values may behave, while the compiler has your back on it is fun.
As Rust also output binaries and have inter-op with C. This means I’m learning about compilers, runtime dependencies, libraries and embedding. There are people on the community that consider a 14kb binary too big. That is so far from what I’m used to, which means there is a lot to learn.
Amazing community
Rust community is very lively. The IRC channel is always full of chats and people try to be helpful and inclusive. This is a big plus as they are trying to build a new language, which makes everybody beginners most of the time.
The language development has a code of conduct, as well as the forum, the IRC, the subreddit and the first conference. The moderators try to no feed trolls, specially when others try to compare Rust against other similar languages, in a battle ‘til death.
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Both communities talk respectfully about the other, despite the languages having been pit against each other by the world.
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I think if someone placed the Rust and Go community in a room and asked them to fight, we’d probably just all order pizza and geek out over languages.
Quoted from a comment about Go vs Rust.
I’m always lurking on the IRC channel. Many of the times I have no clue what is being discussed, but that keeps teasing my curiosity. When I interact, as a beginner, I never experienced down talk, but interest in helping me.
Evolving language
The compiler is amazing and is on constant evolution. The way that changes are proposed feels very interesting from an outsider. All proposed solutions comes from a public discussed RFC, with examples of the benefits of implementing the change, alternatives implementations, drawbacks. They are proposed as Pull Requests, and when they get accepted, after all the discussion, it gets merged and implemented on the compiler.
Carol Nichols wrote a bit on this post about getting a change landed in, and it does feel that the community is open to change just by reading it.
Lot of potential
As it is an evolving language and really new, there is a lot of libraries that need to be written. As you go, you will find the need of a JSON parsing tool, or async I/O, which is still in development as libraries. That means you can help with that! Get that sweet little IRC bot written with little competition or check what the community wants to see being developed now that Rust is 1.0.
One other thing that I find interesting. Many of the concepts that on other languages are implemented on the language itself, are possible as libraries. For example, async I/O or green threads, are already being developed as libraries. That means that the language is simple and powerful enough to delegate some of the decisions to libraries, when the community feels the need.
Many of the concerns that the team have is to be able to have a “minimal runtime” and “efficient C bindings”. This means embedding, while still maintaining “guaranteed memory safety” is a thing. All this quoted goals are extracted from the main page of the project.
Writing a Ruby gem that uses Rust code: a thing.
Writing node.js modules that uses Rust code: a thing.
Powerful type system and compiler
I’m a big fan of algebraic data types, as it is implemented in
Rust. Modeling the application with enums and expressing the
guarantees of a function through it’s type signature makes code
navigation and documentation so much more insightful. That means
that Option<String> as the result of a function call could
possibly not have the value I want because of something, and that is
better than having a null pointer exception blowing up your runtime.
It also have niceties like pattern matching and is immutable by default. The combination of features makes you feel you are writing a high level functional language, with the power of small runtime of a system language. I’m quite fond of this features.
The compiler is quite smart and yells at you when you make
mistakes. After you get used to being pointed your mistakes on
compilation, you start to thank rustc. Things that could lead to
accessing uninitialized memory means that your code won’t even
compile. And for me that is a great thing, as I don’t know much
about dealing with memory myself. I much prefer to let a program do
that instead.
Many of the error messages comes with a longer explanation of why
you are not allowed to do such things. On the error, there is a
suggestion to run rustc --explain E0001 to read more about, and
you can check many of the errors on this page.
Documentation is first class
To be honest, it took me a while to get used to the documentation format and links. There is a lot of information on it, but it is treated really well by the community.
You can write example code on your comments, and it is compiled during the test phase! It is a failure of compilation if your examples are bad.
Because the function signature is explicit, the documentation tool can generate links between them, and you can happily navigate.
Some killer projects
As Mozilla is planning to use Rust on it’s rendering engine for Firefox, there is already a killer-project being produced. And many of the development is being done on small, focused libraries, which others could benefit from. One example, the html5ever is the HTML parser being used by servo, the new engine. It means you can benefit of the parsing engine that powers a browser on your own project.
Big win here.
Conclusion
The language has it’s issues, like some syntax peculiarities, which
is rather pointy (hi, turbo-fish operator ::<>), the compiler yells
at you and you catch yourself many times thinking if you need a
string on the Heap or on the Stack, but it is being really FUN!
The potential this language has, with the combination of features and placement of the low-high level programming spectrum is quite unique. I will keep exploring Rust for sure.