Learning Rust language

Recently, I decided to learn Rust programming language and even implement some not too ambitious, but real project in it. I had two reasons for it:

So, let’s begin. As usual, if you can’t apt-get it, either it does not exist or does not deserve attention. In case of rust, everything is there: ~~~ # apt-get install rustc cargo rust-doc ~~~

After that, one can browse file:///usr/share/doc/rust-doc/index.html, and start learning either by tutorial, either by series of examples. Standard library reference is also there. Unfortunatelly, documentation is typeset rather poorly; I was forced to use graphical browser.

Rust position itself like very safe C, but with high-level abstractions, like algebraic data types and type inference to make programming comfortable. It feels like C++ done right.

Well, not everything is impeachable. For a language, that claims to be replacement for C, simple “hello world” program, yielding 200Kb binary is, well, much.

After programming Haskell, any other language feels inexpressive, error-prone and repetive. So, if you are okay with huge binaries (tens of megabytes) and garbage collector, just use Haskell.

On other hand, if you are considering C++, or even C, maybe it worth give Rust a shot. Beside smart idea of borrow-checking, Rust has features, that are lacking even in Haskell:


  1. http://gittup.org/tup↩︎