We’ve got two parallel streams going here. One is up to chapter 10 on Traits and the other on chapter 5 on Structs & Enums.

  • How are we feeling about Rust the language?
  • Any persistent confusions or difficulties?
  • Favourite features or success stories?
  • How are we finding “The Book” in general?
    • Personally, I think it’s good but not great and am definitely reaching out for other learning experiences or materials, lately finding myself going through the Std Lib Docs a bit
    • Andy Balaam’s Rust Tutorial Series over on peertube are also good and I recently remembered to watch them as I go

Otherwise … any thoughts or requests on what else can happen here for those going through “The Book”?

  • I’m thinking of having posts on sets of chapters once the two twitch streams have gotten up to them.
  • So right now, both have gotten through the borrow checker chapter (ch 4).
  • The idea would be to have a reading club happen here too … to allow written discussion/questions here for those not able to make the streams (or who like/prefer written discussion), but also to provide a retrospective for those who’ve gone through the streams.
  • Personally, in these discussions I’d post my understanding of the topic, look back on the quizzes to see what tripped me up, or any other practical issues I ran into, and post anything else I may have found that helped me on the topic. Basically to see what I actually learned from that chapter.
  • Thoughts??
  • Another thing I can think of is challenges and exercises. I tried one a while back, but I think it was too much/long, so smaller exercises would probably work better for getting us thinking/coding in rust. AoC has come up and there are plenty of others. Would regular posts from such a thing be welcome or helpful??
    • ericjmorey@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      I was looking for something that’s not focused on memory safety at the expense of ergonomics. I was looking at Zig but I watched an interview with Odin’s inventor. I liked how he was approaching the language development trying use what has been learned from C and C++ but not trying to be compatible with C in the way Zig is.

      The ecosystem is very immature compared to Rust and even less mature than Zig. But I want to keep with it for a bit.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Ah right … makes sense. I don’t know how successful languages like Zig and Nim are but it’s interesting to see the energy around making a sort of modern C / C++ 2.0.

        My feeling around it all, however naive or unworkable, is always that real silver bullet is seamlessly composable features. Where in one ecosystem or “language” you can opt in to a borrow checker, or GC or ref counter or manual mem management, or dynamic or static typing etc … when and if you please. More and more new languages feels like it might be a dead end at a high level. In this respect, the “idea” of Mojo vaguely made sense to me (I never looked closely at it).

        • ericjmorey@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          If Mojo actually becomes libre software, I’ll start looking closer. It seems neat from a distance now, but I won’t invest energy on proprietary languages.