With the growing number of resources to learn Rust nowadays, where does one even begin? How does one get into writing idiomatic Rust code as quickly as possible? If passively consuming content isn't for you, here's some tips and ideas to kickstart your carcinisation.
Tips For Breaking Down Your First Bit Of Metal
You're excited to learn Rust and you want to build something; awesome!
Here's the rub, though: projects are great for learning, but have you ever stopped to consider the scale and dimensions of what you're about to undertake? Pick a project that's too gargantuan and you wind up stopping dead in your tracks early on. Pick a project that's too trivial and you feel unsatisfied from what you've learned. Both of these finishes can put a knot in your quest to learn the language.
This isn't to say that you can't have failed projects that have taught you lessons. The bigger problem stems from failed projects that affect your motivation to continue learning.
Here's a number of tips and approaches I've picked up over the years that have worked for me coming to new languages or technologies:
-
Don't fuss over quirks - Quirks of a language and its tooling are important, and you'll get to them, but it's wise to think about knowledge like a jar that's to be filled with rocks; focus on locking in the big concepts first, then fill out your knowledge with the next smaller granularity of detail. The jar-filled-with-rocks analogy is a bit like Zeno's paradox, however, as there is always another finer grained detail you can put into the jar.
-
Be specific before you generalize - try to write concrete implementations before you tackle generics. This is true even if you're not starting anew with Rust! It is drastically simpler to generalize a tableau of concrete things than it is to first start with a generalization. Keep in mind this isn't a rule, and sometimes starting with the generalization will save you a lot of headaches.
-
You can borrow/reference things later - writing correct programs that clone all over the place should be your first order of business. In the same spirit of "make it work", the beauty of having
clonebe explicit is you will be able to tell where copies are happening, and hence be able to switch over to borrowing in time. Until then, focus first on getting the foundations laid down, namely with ownership. -
Foundations are built from smaller insights - if there is anything you take away from this article, it should be this: large-scale projects are educational, but the learnings from them can be sparse and unclear. It's far better to start with smaller understandings and build up from there to bigger projects. If you do want to do a bigger project, focus on each module as it's own encapsulated thing that can be tested and run in isolation and later rigged up to the main system.
-
Hold an experimenters mindset - as you cover the surface area of the language, you'll start to ask questions. Those questions are best answered and captured in minimal code examples or in notes. I find code examples better here because I can continually run the example against different versions of a language as time goes on. Using gists or gist-like services is a great way to store ad hoc solutions to questions you have. In fact, the Rust playground will save its permalinks to gist files, but it can help to have everything all in a single place for yourself. GitHub gists also support multi-file gists meaning you can tuck in a
Cargo.tomlmanifest or other parts that may be relevant to the code. This is why I also suggest sometimes having alaborplaygroundrepository for various snippets, too, butcargo newalready bootstraps a git repo that it is easy to push up various experiments. If you are using GitHub, you can automate theghCLI to also create a new repository, too, allowing you to automate the whole process without having to go to a browser. -
Read rust code from major projects - If you want to start writing idiomatic code, try observing the common patterns you see in major projects. Idioms are formed as a communal reaction. Understanding global and local idioms alike can help you discover which work for you or your team. Resources like lib.rs, the Rust standard library, and other major projects on various source code hosting platforms can let you dip into interesting portions of code without being overwhelmed by the whole of the project.
-
Translate code from another language to explore the shape of things - For those coming to Rust from another language, it can help to translate from your language of choice with the caveat that Rust is its own language and the mapping is not going to be one-to-one. Translations are helpful as lessons around what is similarly possible, different, and non-existent between your source and target languages. As an example, I learned a lot about closures and function types in Rust when I tried to port a property-based testing library from Haskell to Rust, but I now know I would not build it the same way that the Haskell code was written. There is a similar desire to do the same for C, C++, or other C-derived languages since they are so similar to Rust, but again, Rust is enough of it's own beast that you are likely better off deeply understanding the concepts and having a mental model of what you are about to build and going off that rather than directly porting code. Also, side note: if you have a desire to cleanup the code you are about to translate, keep in mind that the sooner you start writing Rust code. This is also true if the intent of the conversion isn't about education and more about bringing over code into Rust, as you will be able to refine the code once you have the rough semblance of logic laid down.
If there is a single most important point above, it is the point about the "experimentalist" or "explorer's" mindset. Treat what you are about to go into like an alien landscape; if you make small, insular understandings over time, they will chalk up to forming a really intricate patchwork of knowledge. Rust is a hard language, but the notion is that by moving slower in localised spots we move faster overall. Rust seeks to help you discover more problems at the time you are writing code than when you have released it into the wild. With time, any programming language gets faster to write code in overall: you know the idioms, the options for solving various problems, common libraries, and what is caked into the language from the start.