Rust, week 2...

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The continued, albeit slow, adventures of someone who's been coding for 37 years and is now learning Rust...

Things I like about Rust, pt2...
  • std::option::Option - no more Null... force error check at point of creation
  • Inbuilt testing framework
  • RustFmt - code formatting !
  • Everything is on Github... and I mean everything... fantastic !
  • Safety is not sacrificed for simplicity. Yes, Rust is a complex language, but that's because decisions have been made which puts safety and control first rather than convenience.
  • The team provide editor integration plugins... including the mighty VIM !
Things I don't like about Rust
  • Opening curly brackets on the right... argh ! I know it's just convention, but argh ! 
There's something quite exciting about the Rust community... the deeper I delve into the language and how the project is organised the more excited I get. One major problem with older languages like C and C++ is that the ecosystem around how you develop software in those languages is a bit of a free-or-all. How may build systems are there out there for C++ projects ??? Loads... Code formatters ?... loads. Library managers...loads...etc. The C++ language itself may be well specified but the ecosystem in which it lives is all over the place. Modern language designers are not making this mistake.

Rust comes with a suite of tools to standardise the ecosystem of the Rust language... and this is a good thing. Go does the same. Having standard ecosystem makes the heavy lifting around learning a language much easier. If you want to buid a Rust project you plop yourself into the root of the project and type 'cargo build'... that's it. You're not mucking about with configs, makefiles, cmake or any other custom build system. This gets a thumbs up from me.

Anyway, more next week as I get further through The Book and keep prodding around in rustlang.

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