Hey!

I’m a professional software engineer with several years of experience using Rust. Unfortunately I don’t really have the time to contribute to Lemmy directly myself, but I love teaching other people Rust so if:

  • You are curious about Rust and why you should even learn it
  • You are trying to learn Rust but maybe having a hard time
  • You are wondering where to start
  • You ran into some specific issue

… or anything to do with Rust really, then feel free to ask in the comments or shoot me a PM 🙂

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    8 months ago

    You are wondering where to start

    Since a lot of people are new, this might be helpful! Maybe what your learning journey was like, and if there are any resources you recommend?

    Also thank you :)

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkOPEnglish
      5·
      8 months ago

      TL;DR:

      • Learned basic C++ as my first language (would not recommend) many years ago
      • Went to study computer science at university
      • Was intrigued by Rust from online blog posts, learned it in my free time as a student
      • Have been working professionally with Rust for more than 2 years now

      Long version:

      I “learned” C++ as my first language many years ago. I say “learned” because I just learned the basic syntax and some of the concepts about computers, like how the stack and the heap works and processes and threads and stuff like that. It was very early and I didn’t really understand much, was just experimenting.

      I then started studying computer science. We were exposed to many different programming languages at the university. Over the years, you got a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Especially during my master’s I learned a lot as I was exposed to Haskell and in general nicer-working type systems.

      Around the same time I started noticing blog posts about Rust online. I became quite intrigued with the language as it had a lot of promise and I was curious if it could really live up to the hype.

      I then just started reading The Book and I was very quickly convinced that this language was actually living up to the hype. It’s a very nice blend of object-oriented and functional programming, with an algebraic type system and monad-like error handling, which is just miles ahead of the usual exception-based error handling that many other languages use.

      Then I basically started using it in all my side-projects in my free time, slowly building up a familiarity with the package ecosystem and the idiomatic way of writing Rust, reading lots of examples and documentation and such.

      Nowadays, I would humbly call myself an expert in Rust or at least close to it. I think I’ve seen nearly all the language has to offer and ran into many of its weirder parts. I have a very good understanding of ownership and the borrow checker and I usually know exactly what is wrong and what to do about it when the compiler yells at me. The only thing I haven’t really touched is embedded (no-std) programming in Rust.