Rust for the Polyglot Programmer

[diziet]

Rust is definitely in the news. I'm definitely on the bandwagon. (To me it feels like I've been wanting something like Rust for many years.) There're a huge number of intro tutorials, and of course there's the Rust Book.

A friend observed to me, though, that while there's a lot of "write your first simple Rust program" there's a dearth of material aimed at the programmer who already knows a dozen diverse languages, and is familiar with computer architecture, basic type theory, and so on. Or indeed, for the impatient and confident reader more generally. I thought I would have a go.

Rust for the Polyglot Programmer is the result.

Compared to much other information about Rust, Rust for the Polyglot Programmer is:

• Dense: I assume a lot of starting knowledge. Or to look at it another way: I expect my reader to be able to look up and digest non-Rust-specific words or concepts.

• Broad: I cover not just the language and tools, but also the library ecosystem, development approach, community ideology, and so on.

• Frank: much material about Rust has a tendency to gloss over or minimise the bad parts. I don't do that. That also frees me to talk about strategies for dealing with the bad parts.

• Non-neutral: I'm not afraid to recommend particular libraries, for example. I'm not afraid to extol Rust's virtues in the areas where it does well.

• Terse, and sometimes shallow: I often gloss over what I see as unimportant or fiddly details; instead I provide links to appropriate reference materials.

After reading Rust for the Polyglot Programmer, you won't know everything you need to know to use Rust for any project, but should know where to find it.

Thanks are due to Simon Tatham, Mark Wooding, Daniel Silverstone, and others, for encouragement, and helpful reviews including important corrections. Particular thanks to Mark Wooding for wrestling pandoc and LaTeX into producing a pretty good-looking PDF. Remaining errors are, of course, mine.

Comments are welcome of course, via the Dreamwidth comments or Salsa issue or MR. (If you're making a contribution, please indicate your agreement with the Developer Certificate of Origin.)

edited 2021-09-29 16:58 UTC to fix Salsa link targe, and 17:01 and 17:21 to for minor grammar fixes

Comments

[lovingboth]

What a good idea, thank you.

One thing that would be useful at the start is something on just how polyglot the reader is expected to be.

I have just read "Rust's type system is based on Hindley-Milner-style algebraic types, as seen in languages like ML and Haskell." Not knowing either of those, it's difficult to know what to do first: look up H-M, look at those languages, or look at another Rust guide.

[diziet]

I certainly wouldn't say "go learn Haskell first" :-). As a rule of thumb, I always type unknown things in to Wikipedia. In this case the rather cheesy c&p job "Hindley-Milner-style algebraic types" has as top hit the article on the Hindley–Milner type system. Unfortunately that seems to have been written by mathematicians, who as usual have somehow managed to make an incredibly abstruse Wikipedia article about something relatively straightforward. Um. I think I am making your point for you :-).

So, I have just made that phrase a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_data_type which is quite a good article. I was resisting making every technical term a link (especially to general references sources) but you're not the first to trip over this. And actually maybe I should stop thinking of Wikipedia as a general reference source and instead realise that it's actually a universal specialist reference source - which is why the maths articles are inscrutable...

Typo in the introduction

[(Anonymous)]

Thx for writing this. I will definitely read it as I'm trying to get more familiar with the language. Though there is a typo in the introduction "Monomorphisation and dynamic despatch". It should be "dynamic d_i_spatch", right?

Regards, Alex

Re: Typo in the introduction

[diziet]

You're not the first to notice this :-). The spelling "despatch" is listed as an alternative in my copy of Chambers. When my attention was draw to the word by a reviewer, I found I nearly always used "despatch". Evidently my idiolect prefers "despatch", and I decided to keep it. I hope it's not too distracting.

Re: Typo in the introduction

[(Anonymous)]

Well searching on the web "dispatch" seems to be the more common spelling. I'm not a native speaker for English and can't say for certain which one is the better choice. It's your text so it is up to you. :-)

Regards, Alex