I was trying to write this post for almost two to three months now… and I am getting the feeling, it is something that cannot be done. Ever…

Anyhow, content must be born!
-by me, again

How was my first “month” with Rust?

I have to say: I love Rust… and I hope Rust loves me back. Nevertheless, that was not an easy ride…

I started to experiment with Rust perhaps at the end of September. Sure, I did run some snippets before that… but never sat down to learn it.
In this case, the approach was something else again, I needed to write some software for business reasons, and well, I was not programming at that point for a half to whole year…

My choice fell on Rust.

Why not? Why should not I learn it now by creating some meaningful thing?!

Well, there are a lot of reasons why not. However, my decision was made, and I did two little projects.
But what did I learn?

Rust is unique!

When one begins to deal with this language - regardless from which area (s)he comes - will face new approaches:

Rust is not object-oriented

Though, it has a few features which can be tagged as “object-oriented”, because Rust is influenced by a few OOP languages and that shows up sometimes in the syntax too.
We have Struct and Enum and we can implement methods for them. Encapsulation is present…

… while inheritance is not. Although, there are trait-s, so you can share code.

In any way: you can create OOP-like code in Rust if you insist.

Rust is not functional

Well, at least it is close to that. I mean, by default Rust do not want to be functional, but a lot of features of this language is definitely functional. We can say that too, Rust is influenced by a lot of functional paradigms.

We have iterators, we have closures…

Overall, Rust does in fact adhere to many FP principles, though not all.

In detail, you can read about this on FP Complete.

What is Rust then?

Well, we can say that Rust is multi-paradigm. It has a little bit of this, a little bit of that… with a structured and imperative backbone.

Designed for performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. One of the most powerful features is, that Rust does a lot of correctness checking at compile time. Hence, there is no garbage collection at all, still, it can guarantee memory safety!

Rust has been called a systems programming language… but to be honest: you can do basically everything with it. It is a general-purpose language! With a strong typing system and type inference.

Rust represents the best ideas from the last 30-years of cutting edge research in language design

What do I do with it?

After my two little projects in the autumn, I began the Advent of Code in December.
This is some kind of competition between the participants with cute algorithmic tasks. Though, it was not about competing with others for me but learning.

Well, I did learn a lot.

First, I learned humility. Rust is hard!
Perhaps you are a professional, but the learning curve of Rust is very steep. Initially, you do not really experience success until you understand how Rust works.

But I learned about how software should be written. The whole language is a best practice. Just very hard to understand at the first sight.

I learned not to be afraid of complex things. Now I know, it will be worse over time.

Nonetheless, I have several ideas and projects… and at this point, Rust is the closest language for me, so I hope I will do plenty of things.
And even I have a little contribution in the yew crate already!

What should you do with it?

Learn it! Okay, okay… I am not saying that you have to switch to Rust, but it is definitely worth a look.

• Rust forms how you think about types and values resting in memory. How you access them… how you should access them.
• Rust guides you on how not to make mistakes.
• Rust loves you.

Have no doubts: it is not a walk in the park or a course for the faint-hearted…
… yet I recommend it to anyone who is enough determined to check it out!