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 9 months ago

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

submitted 7 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] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I think its quite difficult to write Rust. I can get something working but any refactoring is a pain, and I usually get issues with the borrow checker as soon as I move things around.

And it's complicated to get the lifetimes correct too. I feel like it's just a lot of effort, and not very fun to put so much time into figuring out Rust rather than what my program should do.

But if I stick with it, it will probably become second nature. It's just a very annoying language sometimes because of the mental gymnastics.

I switched to go and produced two full programs in a few weekends. It's just so much faster to write. Of course I could have bugs in those programs that Rust wouldn't allow. So I see the upside of Rust but it's just hard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I usually get issues with the borrow checker as soon as I move things around.

Once you get familiar with thinking in terms of the borrow checker (i.e. thinking in terms of how data can be safely accessed essentially), you'll be more at ease and you'll start building stuff from the start in ways that anticipate many of the issues you might run into. That's my experience at least.

You "just" need to consider how you structure and access the data in your program. If you've used languages with garbage collectors a lot before, you're not used to thinking like that because the garbage collector just accepts whatever structure you give it and says "well I guess I'll have to make it work somehow, someway (with a lot of effort)".

You'll find that once you structure your program in a way that the Rust compiler likes, it also becomes a lot easier to reason about it in general. A garbage collector won't "force" you to structure your program well in this way, which is why that kind of memory management often becomes messy when it scales to more than a few thousand lines of code.

Just having the right editor setup and such can also help a lot for productivity.

it’s complicated to get the lifetimes correct too

Lifetimes is an advanced topic that you mostly don't need when you're starting out. It can often be avoided by sacrificing some small performance, for instance by cloning data. But lifetimes are also a very cool feature, it just takes a bit to understand it well. Once you get it, it's not so bad though.

If you have any more specific questions about what you were trying to build or what errors you ran into, feel free to ask :)