This book will focus on the practical side of things, showing you what you need to know to get things done. I’ll leave the nitty-gritty to more comprehensive books such as Programming Rust, 2nd ed. (O’Reilly) and The Rust Programming Language (No Starch Press). I highly recommend that you read one or both of those along with this book to dig deeper into the language itself.
You should also read this book if you’d like to see how to write and run tests to check Rust programs. I’m an advocate for using tests not only to verify that programs work properly but also as an aid to breaking a problem into small, understandable, testable parts. I will demonstrate how to use tests that I have provided for you as well as how to use test-driven development (TDD), where you write tests first and then write code that passes those tests. I hope that this book will show that the strictness of the Rust compiler combined with testing leads to better programs that are easier to maintain and modify.
Why You Should Learn Rust
There are plenty of reasons to learn Rust. First, I find that Rust’s type checking prevents me from making many basic errors. My background is in more dynamically typed languages like Perl, Python, and JavaScript where there is little to no checking of types. The more I used statically typed languages like Rust, the more I realized that dynamically typed languages force much more work onto me, requiring me to verify my programs and write many more tests. I gradually came to feel that the Rust compiler, while very strict, was my dance partner and not my enemy. Granted, it’s a dance partner who will tell you every time you step on their toes or miss a cue, but that eventually makes you a better dancer, which is the goal after all. Generally speaking, when I get a Rust program to compile, it usually works as I intended.
Second, it’s easy to share a Rust program with someone who doesn’t know Rust or is not a developer at all. If I write a Python program for a workmate, I must give them the Python source code to run and ensure they have the right version of Python and all the required modules to execute my code. In contrast, Rust programs are compiled directly into a machine-executable file. I can write and debug a program on my machine, build an executable for the architecture it needs to run on, and give my colleague a copy of the program. Assuming they have the correct architecture, they will not need to install Rust and can run the program directly.
Third, I often build containers using Docker or Singularity to encapsulate workflows. I find that the containers for Rust programs are often orders of magnitude smaller than those for Python programs. For instance, a Docker container with the Python runtime may require several hundred MB. In contrast, I can build a bare-bones Linux virtual machine with a Rust binary that may only be tens of MB in size. Unless I really need some particular features of Python, such as machine learning or natural language processing modules, I prefer to write in Rust and have smaller, leaner containers.
Finally, I find that I’m extremely productive with Rust because of the rich ecosystem of available modules. I have found many useful Rust crates—which is what libraries are called in Rust—on crates.io, and the documentation at Docs.rs is thorough and easy to navigate.
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