11
votes
Any Rustaceans in the House?
I'm just starting to get into the ecosystem by going through the Book of Rust, and then maybe playing with Parity. Just wondering if anyone else has been through this yet and is up for some conversation!
I've done a fair bit, but mostly a few years back while things were still changing a lot. Mostly little practice problems like Rosetta Code, cellular automata, and a tiny bit of work on Iota text editor project. The most ambitious project was probably trying to implement a zork/infocom interpreter (which I didn't finish) or solving the Synacore puzzle (which I nearly did).
Having only done the slightest work in C or C++ before starting (some Ada in school was the closest reference point), I really learned a lot about memory allocation and lower level programming in general. The way Rust handles Strings as truly being Unicode and not just arrays of bytes was a big eye-opener even if it could be frustrating sometimes.
My professional work is in Ruby/Rails and some Javascript, so the emphasis on provable correctness is such a refreshing pleasure.
I've been looking at getting in to Rust and seeing how it differs from C++. I check http://arewegameyet.com/ once in a while. I'm particular interested in the whole crate thing and build system and how easy it would be to glue everything together when compared to the painful process it is in C++
I've been almost exclusively looking into Rust as a language for game architecture, actually! ChuckleFish is actually building their newest game in Rust - check out this article they released on their development experience so far!
Thanks :) I remember reading about it before, it's definitely a good sign to see real game studios make the switch.
I've read through the Book, and I started writing a little command-line app to keep my Git repos up to date - I should really start working on it again.
I want to like the language, as I've heard really great things about it, but don't really have good use-case for it (that I know of). Most of my work is in webapps, for which I'm happy using Python or Go in the backend and Vue or Mithril in the frontend. I do enjoy reading the articles that people post about Rust, though.
I am supposed to be working more in Rust, but I have not yet been confronted with the inevitable situation where it will be required of me!
At least Mozilla gave all its engineers a copy of Programming Rust at our last all-hands.
I love Rust, but it was also the most difficult language I've ever learned. If you stumble with anything feel free to message me and I'll try to lend a hand!
I set up the compiler but i did not get started making anything with it...
I've been playing around with it on and off, with a toy GC library under (slow) construction and a few smaller experiments into its macro system. It's been interesting to explore, as I've given my pluggable GC a couple of strict requirements in that it must be truly parametric over the GC implementation (i.e. GcRef<T, GCImpl> behaves identically forall GCImpl) and the allocations must be async-capable, returning futures of the GCRef<T, _> (this required porting bang syntax from Idris to a Rust macro to make it comfortable to work with/avoid callback hell, however). Now that the basic architecture is done and the engineering is to begin, I've let it sit on the back burner, though.
I haven't found Rust to be hard to learn (sans the old module system) as my undergrad dissertation was on applying a generalised form of linear typing and parametric polymorphism to C (and Idris started to introduce uniqueness types around the same time as I started Rust), but what really stood out is how it made my C and C++ so much cleaner (ignoring the necessary syntactic noise to get vtables and function pointers working in C).