https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/10/introducing-rust-crash-course

I also blog frequently on the Yesod Web Framework blog, as well as the FP Complete blog.

See a typo? Have a suggestion? Edit this page on Github

I’m announcing an upcoming series of blog posts, which I’m calling the Rust crash course. In this blog post, I want to explain:

• Why I’m interested in Rust
• Why I’m writing up this series
• Who this series is for
• My intended flavor for the series
• Some examples of Rust gotchas I want to cover

I’m getting to work on this series due to increased Rust usage at FP Complete.

Why Rust?

I’m a strong believer in using the compiler to help eliminate bugs. No programming language can eliminate all bugs and even the best designed language will typically need to leave developers plenty of wiggle room to shoot themselves in the foot. Still, there’s significant value in safety and long term maintainability of projects that use languages with this focus.

For about ten years now, my primary language has been (and continues to be) Haskell. It gets a lot of things right here, such as immutability, explicit effects, and strong typing. But I’ve got two problems with an intense focus on Haskell:

• There’s always something to be learned from other languages. It’s quite easy to fall into the trap of knowing one language well, and becoming blind to its shortcomings. Haskell is now the language I’ve used for the longest stretch of time as a primary language, finally displacing Java. I need to avoid this trap.
• There are some legitimate technical advantages of Rust:
  • Performance is better, and more reliable as well, relying less upon things like rewrite rules firing
  • It’s got a better story right now for mobile and frontend development
  • Lack of garbage collection opens up new possibilities in real time development
  • Rust improves on Haskell’s safety guarantees in some places, such as defaulting to requiring complete pattern matches

Like many others, I’ve been hearing a buzz around Rust for years. Two or so years ago, I started playing around with it more, and have been steadily dedicating more personal time to it. But recently, we’ve had more Rust interest at work, and therefore we’ve been expanding our internal Rust team.

Why this series?

We’re a globally distributed team at FP Complete, and we make a heavy push towards using written communication tools wherever possible. This also overlaps heavily with training material. As I do more training (both internally, and for customers), I’m discovering places where:

• I’m finding my own knowledge of the language was lacking