Posts for July 2017

2017-07-31: Learning Rust

I'm obviously not spending much time writing here. It's been a rather busy month at work, and I've been doing other things on the weekend that aren't particularly interesting to write about.

This past week, though, I took advantage of our semi-annual Hack Week to finally learn Rust. I have several co-workers who love the language and have been wanting to stretch my programming language knowledge a bit. I was also profoundly disappointed by Go, which has been touted as the new C-style systems language but which I think is awful. All the reasons why is a topic for another post, but the obnoxiously verbose error handling is probably my biggest complaint. (This is the worst property of C; why would you copy it?) Rust was a favorite of a few people who felt the same way I did about Go, which seemed promising.

I made it through the first thirteen chapters of the second edition Rust book and wrote a not-entirely-trivial program (a tool to filter and search trace logs a Dropbox client) with a co-worker, and I think I'm in love with this language. It reminds me of everything I liked about Perl, except with all the weird bolted-on bits of Perl cleaned up and done properly, and with types. Despite having spent most of my career writing Perl and Python (and C, which is typed but not very well), I love strongly-typed languages. I just usually don't like the rest of the syntax of languages like Java and Go. Rust avoids the garbage collection nonsense (and huge performance issues), gives me the level of fine control that I am used to with C, but gets rid of memory allocation errors and provides a much richer type system and type matching. It feels a bit like an approachable Haskell, and I quickly found myself chaining iterators and pushing myself to write in a more functional style.

The lifetime stuff in Rust can be frustrating, and there are a few limitations that can be hard to deal with (like iterating over one field of a struct while modifying another field of a struct, which comes up a lot and which is the sort of thing you have to avoid in Rust). But I like a language with a very picky compiler. And I love programming in a language where my first attempt is clunky and verbose, and then I think about the problem a bit and rewrite it in half as many lines of code, and then I sleep on it and come back and can delete half of the code again.

I sadly don't have a lot of work projects right now where Rust is the right answer. I'm mostly maintaining existing code bases in Python, and Python is more accessible and more maintainable in most situations. But I now would love to find the time to rewrite a bunch of my personal C projects in Rust, and I'm watching for any new opportunity to use Rust.

If you like new programming languages, but you don't have the time or inclination to live on the bleeding edge, Rust has gotten more stable and is at a good point to start. The documentation is fantastic, support for generating documentation is built into the language, the Rust book is a great teaching research, and Rust is available as Debian packages (so you don't have to do the horrifying curl | bash nonsense in the official Rust documentation).

Recommended, particularly for people who love Perl or functional languages (or functional Perl heavy on map and grep), want a more modern language with fewer odd corners, and want low-level control and native speed.

2017-07-31 22:07 — Permanent link