Learning Rust and Lemmy

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Welcome

A collaborative space for people to work together on learning Rust, learning about the Lemmy code base, discussing whatever confusions or difficulties we're having in these endeavours, and solving problems, including, hopefully, some contributions back to the Lemmy code base.

Rules TL;DR: Be nice, constructive, and focus on learning and working together on understanding Rust and Lemmy.

Running Projects

Rust for Lemmings Reading Club (portal)
Rust beginners challenges (portal)
Heroically Helpful Comments

Policies and Purposes

This is a place to learn and work together.
Questions and curiosity is welcome and encouraged.
This isn't a technical support community. Those with technical knowledge and experienced aren't obliged to help, though such is very welcome. This is closer to a library of study groups than stackoverflow. Though, forming a repository of useful information would be a good side effect.
This isn't an issue tracker for Lemmy (or Rust) or a place for suggestions. Instead, it's where the nature of an issue, what possible solutions might exist and how they could be or were implemented can be discussed, or, where the means by which a particular suggestion could be implemented is discussed.

Rules

Lemmy.ml rule 2 applies strongly: "Be respectful, even when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome" (see Dessalines's post). This is a constructive space.
Don't demean, intimidate or do anything that isn't constructive and encouraging to anyone trying to learn or understand. People should feel free to ask questions, be curious, and fill their gaps knowledge and understanding.
Posts and comments should be (more or less) within scope (on which see Policies and Purposes above).
See the Lemmy Code of Conduct
Where applicable, rules should be interpreted in light of the Policies and Purposes.

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founded 7 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Looking to learn Rust? Curious about Rust? Feel free to ask me (feddit.dk)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey!

I'm a professional software engineer with several years of experience using Rust. Unfortunately I don't really have the time to contribute to Lemmy directly myself, but I love teaching other people Rust so if:

You are curious about Rust and why you should even learn it
You are trying to learn Rust but maybe having a hard time
You are wondering where to start
You ran into some specific issue

... or anything to do with Rust really, then feel free to ask in the comments or shoot me a PM 🙂

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You are wondering where to start

Since a lot of people are new, this might be helpful! Maybe what your learning journey was like, and if there are any resources you recommend?

Also thank you :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

TL;DR:

Learned basic C++ as my first language (would not recommend) many years ago
Went to study computer science at university
Was intrigued by Rust from online blog posts, learned it in my free time as a student
Have been working professionally with Rust for more than 2 years now

Long version:

I "learned" C++ as my first language many years ago. I say "learned" because I just learned the basic syntax and some of the concepts about computers, like how the stack and the heap works and processes and threads and stuff like that. It was very early and I didn't really understand much, was just experimenting.

I then started studying computer science. We were exposed to many different programming languages at the university. Over the years, you got a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Especially during my master's I learned a lot as I was exposed to Haskell and in general nicer-working type systems.

Around the same time I started noticing blog posts about Rust online. I became quite intrigued with the language as it had a lot of promise and I was curious if it could really live up to the hype.

I then just started reading The Book and I was very quickly convinced that this language was actually living up to the hype. It's a very nice blend of object-oriented and functional programming, with an algebraic type system and monad-like error handling, which is just miles ahead of the usual exception-based error handling that many other languages use.

Then I basically started using it in all my side-projects in my free time, slowly building up a familiarity with the package ecosystem and the idiomatic way of writing Rust, reading lots of examples and documentation and such.

Nowadays, I would humbly call myself an expert in Rust or at least close to it. I think I've seen nearly all the language has to offer and ran into many of its weirder parts. I have a very good understanding of ownership and the borrow checker and I usually know exactly what is wrong and what to do about it when the compiler yells at me. The only thing I haven't really touched is embedded (no-std) programming in Rust.