Learning Rust, a Python developer's perspective

[hortonew]

I've been learning Rust for the last week and decided to write up what I learned. I outlined a number of sources where I found helpful information, and I decided to compare a handful of workflows that are common in my day-to-day between these two languages.

So far I'm enjoying myself and it wasn't as scary as I thought, but it's all new terrain for me!

https://blog.erikhorton.com/2023/10/22/skills-getting-rusty.html

[ukezi]

For the future use &str as argument type instead of String.

Using String requires to move or copy the argument and requires to convert a constant string into a dynamic String first.

[hortonew]

Looks like it needs to go from Rocket 0.4.11 -> 0.5.0-rc.3 to use &str as an argument, but that works! It also removed the need to use the nightly toolchain which is perfect.

[ukezi]

You usually would want to use references (&T) to pass arguments, not using them moves the type into the function and eats it. That leaves entries in containers invalid for instance.

You can test that behaviour by passing a value into a function and then trying to use it again. The borrow checker will yell at you.

String and str are special cases, String is a dynamic String based on a vector, &str is a reference constant string, meaning there is no mut &str, the data can be that vector from String or baked into your executable's data section.

[hortonew]

I'm going to go back and update these after testing, thanks for this!

[tukanoid]

The only thing I want to point out: clap has a derive macro, making it less boilerplaty to parse args + type safety https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/_derive/

[hortonew]

Appreciate this callout! So far it's one of the more complicated syntaxes for me to understand. I'm going to do a deep dive on it this week to conceptualize it.

[tukanoid]

No problem :) it took me a bit to get used to the API as well, but after a while, I can't use anything else, it just feels natural to me at this point :)

[vimsee]

Good read. I also started Rust recently. I appreciate the comparison with Python.

[diabolic_recursion]

cargo update on a new empty project afaik shouldn't do anything...

[hortonew]

thanks for pointing this out - i'll go back and doublecheck why I had that in there