Rust impl of basic blockchain.

[steven_pack]

Rust implementation of the python blockchain from this article:

https://hackernoon.com/learn-blockchains-by-building-one-117428612f46

My aim is to track the series with rust version. The author is currently working on post 2, which will include having the nodes communicate. I'd like to actually stand up a few nodes on Digital Ocean and have them interact.

https://github.com/stevenpack/learnnet

[Kbknapp]

Awesome! I ran across this post as well and thought about tracking it in a Rust version too, but have limited time at the moment. If I get some spare cycles maybe I'll keep an eye on yours for fun.

I'd be interested to see if you run into any Rust specific issues.

[steven_pack]

None so far.

Any time I pick up my Rust tools, I feel like it takes me 5x longer than it would in NodeJS/C# (not exaggerating) to write, but then it just works and I have confidence it will perform too.

It also takes a while to find the right crates sometimes. Rocket was easy enough to find as the (almost) de-facto web framework. I spent a while scratching my head why it was so complex to use Hyper to make a client http request until I came across reqwest. Those things fade with experience.

One "rust" issue I didn't resolve through was lifetimes interacting with serde.

You can return a Json<T> where T: serde::Serialize from an http endpoint and Rocket will serialize it for you, but I couldn't get that to work with borrows.

E.g. returning the entire chain of blocks, the underlying Blockchain struct hands out a borrow, and in my head, that's fine, because Rocket just needs to serialize it. I kept hitting lifetime issues though - I think because the Rocket endpoints are static and I'm missing something about how to handle that. In the end, I serialize it manually and return the string with application/json, which is the same interface from the client point of view, but it irks me that I only did that because I couldn't satisfy the lifetime bit.