Walkthrough Intermission - Rust Part 1
Ah the travails of a journeyman programmer. I honestly switch back and forth between so many different languages and technologies.. and really remain a rank amateur at most of them. Super frustrating.
Alright, what is Rust.. (wikipedia) - basically a safe version of C++, designed for performance, safety and concurrency. As I learned when I tried to massively multithread on python, one of the modern challenges of programming is dealing with doing thing safely at massively parallel scale. Oh Python Global Interpreter Lock, how I loathed thee.
Best way to brush up on Rust, seems to be the go through The Book, so here we go.
- Rust has macros AND functions... we'll find out what they are later
- rust is an ahead-of-time-compiled language, meaning you can pass someone else the built executable... instead of forcing them to have Python to run it
- cargo new creates a nice little template with .gitignore and a git init already done and a nice little hello world which I think is awesome... I mean I remember lots of hunting to decide what a skeleton should look like in my early Python days
- cargo build - build a project
- Instead of saving the result of the build in the same directory as our code, Cargo stores it in the target/debug directory.
- cargo build --release - compile with optimizations
- creates executable in target/release
- cargo run - build and run a project in one step using .
- cargo check - build a project without producing a binary to check for errors using .
- cargo doc --open - auto generates html documentation including dependencies... what a beautiful function really
So nice... really so dev friendly upfront.. Imagine the nightmare around Android Studio and gradle...
Rust’s central feature is ownership.
- Each value in Rust has a variable that’s called its owner.
- There can only be one owner at a time.
- When the owner goes out of scope, the value will be dropped.
Good to know.