Loading...Rust Documentation
I started not so long ago to dive into the Rust programming language, and I want to share how impressed I am about the environment.
The official documentation is extremely nicely built!
You reach the first hello world in no time, with the second chapter you already build something a little more complex, and, as you advanced through chapters, more and more useful concepts are introduced systematically but always keeps a very hands-on approach. I highly appreciate the “learn by doing” way of going through things.
Rust Setup
With each chapter you get to code along, but you don’t have to spend time setting up a complex environment to do this. Rather there are two very easy ways:
- The web-based playground where you can write rust in any web browser
- Setting up rust locally by just running a command in the CLI
You basically get, in no time, an up and running environment, even locally. You get to focus right from the start on the language features rather than the setup.
Further setting up an IDE is as easy as it gets – I got Virtual Studio Code up and ready for rust in minutes, with all the desired features included (like code completion, type hinting, running and debugging, etc.)
Rust environment
The rust compiler and the package manager (cargo) are very easy to use as well, and I enjoyed that you can run, build and check the code independently and this brings a lot of speed during development – a debug build can be built much faster, the code can be checked for compiling without having the need to build and so on.
A modern programming language
Comparing this to the older programming languages which we’re more familiar or started with, that still have documentation that has not evolved that much since the 90’s in their approach, and are full of pre-requisites, makes you see how well modern programming languages have evolved even beyond the language features.
And this modern approach is highly reflected also in the language’s features as well – rust seems to have found such a sweet spot between low level and high level code, which makes it quite easy to be picked up by programmers with less experience in low level code and start doing “systems-level” programming or continue building web apps with the same knowledge base, building skills that transfer from one domain to another.
Now this doesn’t mean that rust is perfectly ideal for everything and has no downsides (e.g., building a web app with rust is do-able but you have to take care about many things) but I will maybe cover this in a different post.
Rust community
Going through this experience I totally get now why in the 2022 Developer Survey on StackOverflow the Rust programming language got voted as the most loved for a seventh year.
So congrats to the Rust community and everyone involved for the amazing job you did!
Additional Rust Development Resources
Some more interesting links:
Rust adoption
Hundreds of companies around the world are using Rust in production today for fast, low-resource, cross-platform solutions. Software you know and love, like Firefox, AWS, Dropbox, and Cloudflare, uses Rust. From startups to large corporations, from embedded devices to scalable web services, Rust is a great fit.
On February 2021, the Rust foundation has also been founded by a conjoined partnership between AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, and was further joined by other Members with a big name in the industry such as Meta, Dropbox, and Activision to name just a few.
Feedback
What is your experience with Rust? Have you tried it so far?
Have you had a similar experience with other programming languages?
Let us know!
