I'm learning Rust!
I’ve been meaning to learn Rust for a long time. I read the book a while ago, and did some trivial exercises, but I didn’t write any real programs. This is a pretty common problem for me: I learn the basics of a language, but don’t put it to any real use. Writing my stupid 24 game solver in Forth definitely helped me think about writing real Forth programs, even if it was just a goof.
Now I’m working on implementing the Software Tools programs in Rust. These are simple programs that solve real world problems, or at least approximations of real world problems. I’ve written programs to copy files, expand and collapse tabs, count words, and compress files. So far, all my programs are pretty obviously mediocre, even to me, but I’m having fun and definitely learning a lot. At first, I thought I’d be working my way through the book program by program, but now I realize that I’m going to continually going back to earlier work to improve it with the things I’m learning as I go.
For example, I sarted off by buffering all my I/O manually, which worked, but made everything I did a bit gross to look at. Later, I found that you can wrap a thing that reads from a file (or other data source) in something that buffers it but then provides the same interface. I went back and added that to my old programs, deleting a bunch of code.
Soon, I know i’m going to be going back to add better command line argument handlng. I’m pretty sure my error handling is all garbage, too.
Still, the general concept has been a great success: I’m writing programs that actually do stuff, and they have fun edge cases, and it’s just a lot less tedious than exercises in a text book.
So far, so good!