this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Learning Rust and Lemmy
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Great thread! Just subscribed to this c/
Sorry I know its a few days old now, but I thought I'd just chime in and ask my question.
First and foremost I'm a self taught web Dev(TypeScript, NodeJS, HTML, CSS), who has also done some small bit of learning C (built a basic UNIX shell and rebuilt some of the
lscommand in C) and done some shell scripting.I'm about half way through the Book and am also following along with a 9 hour long intro Video course from Free Code Camp where the instructor generally just has you go through practice.rs
I'm mainly interested in using Rust as my go to back end language for HTTP/TCP servers and developing JSON and HTML APIs. Can you tell me which frameworks and crates/packages would be good for me to be aware of?
I'm also interested in creating some CLI and TUI applications, so any frameworks/crates/packages I should be aware of in that realm you might recommend would also be greatly appreciated!
Thanks so much. I got some great insights just by perusing this thread thus far!
Look into axum. It's built on top of tower and tower-http, which is a general server/client framework. Axum makes it super easy to make HTTP servers, using either raw HTML or JSON. It has in-built functionality for JSON and if you want to do HTML you can reach for stuff like maud or askama.
There's lot of crates around axum as well. You can try searching lib.rs which is a bit more nicely categorized than crates.io. For logging for example, look into tracing.
For command-line arguments, use the derive functionality from clap. It lets you declare the arguments you want/need as a type and produces all the argument parsing logic for you.
For TUI, I haven't tried it myself but I've heard that ratatui is good.
Thanks so much! I'll be bookmarking these and checking them out as I go along.
Lastly, I just wanted to ask a couple more questions if that's OK.
How long did it take you before you started to become proficient enough in Rust that you could be productive for your employer? Were you already proficient in other systems level programming languages like C or C++ before learning Rust?
Did you get hired as a Rust developer or were you working or your current employer utilizing another programming language and you eventually move to developing in Rust?
Do you see there being more jobs utilizing Rust in the future?
I know that's a lot, so if you don't want to field all of those, I understand, but I'm very curious so I thought I'd just put those out there.
Thanks again!
Not too long, around 3 months maybe. But it depends how much time you spend obviously. Learning the language is fairly quick. Learning the more exotic parts of the language took a bit longer but that's mostly cause I didn't need those things until later. Learning the package ecosystem is also something that can take a bit of research and you kinda have to just keep yourself up to date about cool crates via blog posts and sharing on online communities like this. But all this will probably depend on your prior expertise. I have a master's in computer science so it wasn't a huge deal for me.
I was... okay at C++ before-hand so kinda. But honestly C++ is such a shitty language that looking back I barely had any grasp at that time honestly. With Rust, it's so much easier and I understand how the system works so much better now, simply because Rust forces me to understand it. The compiler is a great teacher!
I was not hired as a Rust developer. There was actually barely any Rust at the company when I joined. There were a few other colleagues interested in it and when I came in we really went for it. It took some convincing of management and stuff but now we use it in a lot of places and I write almost exclusively Rust at work.
But I think I was very lucky in this aspect. There are few places where you will have such an opportunity to influence the technology in that way.
110%. Rust is set to replace languages like C and C++, and at the same time it is heavily competing with other programming languages. Even languages like Python. There's a huge opportunity to improve software reliability across the field with Rust.
Rust is supported by the largest tech companies in the world and is getting integrated into Linux. There has not been a language with this level of dedication and support behind it for a long time.
Growth is happening and it will only accelerate in the coming years. You can even see it happening on Google Trends. It's a great time to learn the language to get ahead of the curve!
Hey I made this thread to answer questions, thank you for asking! I'm sure there are many lurkers who were also curious.
Thanks so very much. Very informative and encouraging. As a mainly TypeScript developer whose only done some dabbing in C, bash, and python, I've been looking for a language that's a bit more abstracted than C, but not so pigeonholed into specific use cases like Golang (I'm still developing an opinion on Golang, not sure how I feel about it).
Rust so far has appeared like quite a beautiful language and the compiler in particular is the best I've ever seen in terms of helpful error/warning messages!
I'm sure I'll have my small complaints as I struggle to get good at Rust in the near future, but I think this is going to be my go to back end language for some time.
I have plans to eventually convert the C code of the terminal based browser, links, to a Rust project to learn more about how a very basic browser is built. I'd also like to do the same for the TUI system monitoring tool btop, which is written in C++.
I think just attempting those two "rewrite it in Rust" projects, once I have other smaller projects under my belt, will probably give me a good understanding not only of Rust, but also aspects of the HTTP/HTTPS protocols and systems programming not commonly encountered in the field of web development.
Last question, I promise, lol. But what do you make of this plan? Are their any caveats or concerns I should be made aware of in regards to this endeavor?
Again, thanks for everything!
I don't have concrete experience with Go but I've read enough about the language to form an armchair opinion. If you ask me, it seems pretty bad. It's like you just took C and you threw a garbage collector and an async runtime on top and called it a day. No lessons learned from any of the 40 years prior of programming language theory, just C with a garbage collector. I think the only reason anyone is using Go is because it's Google and they pushed it a lot. If someone made Go today and wasn't a billion-dollar corporation and tried to convince people to use it, nobody would use it.
I usually use reqwest for HTTP request stuff. But if your goal is to learn about more low level stuff, you might want to use a lower level library like hyper or even just only using the stuff in the standard library.
I'm a big fan of bottom, which is a TUI resource monitor. Maybe you'll get some inspiration from there.
I can't really think of any problems. I think it sounds like a good idea to build some concrete stuff and see what you run into. Just realize that it might take a while before you get used to writing idiomatic Rust code, so don't expect your first project to be your prettiest work... 😅
Definitely. Okay, that's about all I have to ask now. I'm bookmarking this thread though to refer back to. You've given me some great insights and resources, and have also pointed me in the right direction going forward.
For now I'll be just making my way through the Book. I also have Programming Rust, by O'Reilly, Command Line Rust by O'Reilly, and Rust for Rustaceans to reference along with the plethora of online resources.
I might PM you some time in the future (if that's okay) should I get stuck on something I can't figure out through the usual means (i.e. documentation, stack overflow, etc.).
Again, can't thank you enough for the help. Cheers!
There's also zero2prod.com which is really nice as well. There's even a free sample of the book online.
Feel free to but also consider just posting a thread here so others can also see and learn 🙂. Just be sure to @ me to make sure I see it.