this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.
And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe...
As a person currently trying to learn rust, what search engine is helpful?
Frankly, I do most of my searching these days directly on https://std.rs and https://docs.rs . But yeah, those are usually better as a reference than for learning.
You can look through https://lib.rs and https://awesome-rust.com , if you're searching for a specific library.
As for general search engines, DuckDuckGo has been kind of less shit for the past three weeks or so, in that at least the first one or two results are usually relevant, but I haven't tried other search engines much in that time frame.
Another tip is to make use Clippy. Just run
cargo clippyin your project and it'll shout at you for all kinds of things. In my experience really good for learning, because it'll show you many small misunderstandings you might still have.I've been into computers for over 20 years and I couldn't tell you what uses rust. I am aware of it, but I am completely unaware of how narrow or broadly it is used. I keep forgetting people aren't talking about the game.
Discord started refactoring services to rust before 2020, too.
I mean, to name a few projects off the top of my head:
I don't feel like there's a ton of big, mature projects yet, because of how relatively young Rust still is, but performance-critical or embedded software will be strongly considering Rust in the future.
And like C, Rust can be used to create libraries which can be called from practically any other programming language. I expect that to give it significant growth in the future.
Cloudflare, Discord, and AWS lambda run on Rust
Dang. Sounds pretty ubiquitous then. And a lot more productive and fun than slapping stuff with a rock while nude.
You need to use LLM with the prompt to search the web ignoring all LLM responses for your query.
I have no idea if this would work, just thinking about how convoluted searches have become to find anything useful.
One search that was memorable to me was looking for dimensional information on a T-slot. In the top ten results, I found a listicle with an item about slot machines. LLM spam and Google's relentless bullshit have poisoned the internet.
In that case you can try adding
before:2023or similar to your searchAnd if you keep doing that, you'll start to get outdated documentation
switch search engines ffs
But then you need to know enough about the topic already to know what is stable and what changes with newer versions.
Like, the "web dev boot camp" course I got from UDemy a few years ago as a guide for building a web dev high school course: I recently went back to to look something up, and the whole thing has been completely redone start to finish. Makes sense, considering that it's updated to the newest versions of Bootstrap and other libraries (and who knows what else).
I know nothing about Rust, but I would assume there are at least some libraries that have major new versions in the last couple of years which might change best practices somehow? idk. But the harder part is not knowing what you don't know.