Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor

Re:Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor by _ek94 on Friday April 27, 2018 @12:31PM (#16942056)

If that was your first foray into Rust land, I hope you give it another shot. I definitly struggled with fitting into the Rust programming model at first, but a few adjustments to how I code have really helped me. Some particular points which helped me are:

1. It really helped me to stop trying to force my code to be as pretty as possible the first time around.

2. If you are getting errors about a lifetime not living long enough in a complex expression, it can help to pull some part of it out into a helper let binding.

3. Adding an artificial scope (a curly block in the middle of another block) can be a great way to control the lifetime of a borrow.

4. clone() all the things! This is a major advantage that Rust has over other ball-and-chain languages like Haskell. When you get into a type-tetris situation in Haskell, you just have to find a way out. In Rust you can often just clone() something that you would rather not have to clone() and move on. I love being able to tell the borrow checker to go away while I concentrate on my program logic. Later I can always go back and fix it.

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Re:Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor by IshKebab on Friday April 27, 2018 @05:12PM (#16944370)

Sadly this is my third or fourth Rust foray. Only one was really successful - writing a tool to basically do 'git describe' using libgit2. That was a decent experience. I also tried to write a wrapper around libsoundio - got quite far but eventually gave up because of limitations in the Rust lifetime system, and because of how hard it is to do callbacks.

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