artnoiFeb 27, 2023
I promised myself back in 2021 to learn Rust in 2022. That did not happen. Instead, I found myself overwhelmed by the Go library development at my work.
After the core development of the library was done, I gained a bit of free time. So I bough a book on Rust, read through all of its 700 pages, and have since started working on Rust.
After a week with Rust, I just liked it. The developer experience is unmatched once you learn to move past the mystifying bits of Rust - lifetimes and ownership.
Here is why I like Rust.
I believe Rust’s memory safety contract to be the main barrier to Rust for developers who only used GC-ed languages, which I was one.
But once you start to understand the rationale behind Rust’s novel contracts, you begin to appreciate these Rust-specfic rules. And once your code compiles in safe Rust, you can rest assured that there’d be no memory bugs in your programs, which is a huge bless.
In my very limited experience as a Go developer - I learned that “business logic” bugs are easy to find and reason about. But memory bugs? These guys are very catch and required much more elaborate debugging. And it would be even more annoying if the code is concurrent!
With the compiler watching your back, you can be a bit more confident that your Rust program will be free of any data race, and every object you share across threads will always be wrapped in some kind of concurrency primitives so that it’s clear to the programmers.
Rust types are out of this world. You can have algebaric types, enums with values, and powerful traits (Rust’s version of interface), generics, and lifetime annotation.
Traits are super useful to me in Rust. Some ergonomic traits like AsRef, Deref, From are super useful when composing any type or function signatures in your application.
Traits like Iterator unifies so many actions we have been doing in the for-loop in a very coherent, functional ways.
Rust is a multi-paradigm language with, IMO, combines the best traits from each paradigm. You want to do this imperatively? Done. You want to lazily chain methods together and avoid keeping states? That you can do. You want to exercise your OOP composing skill? Rust can do that too, albiet without a class keyword.
With this look and feel, you can choose any paradigm to solve any specific problems.
Rust macros are nice. Although I haven’t yet learn Rust’s procedural macros, I still think Rust macros are pretty cool especially for generating code.
Attributes are great. They can be used to do anything from generating code, instructing the compiler to use different implementations or representation, platform-specific code, and many more. It is like 1000x times more powerful than Go’s struct tags.
Rust’s tools are very nice. The toolchain comes complete with formatter, linter, package manager and the best compiler I’ve ever used.