Learning a new programming language is always a nice way to kick your brain into action. I first experienced this when I tried to learn Lisp by watching some video lectures. It took me months to digest the concepts and I never got around to writing any lisp. But the ideas stayed with me for years. Later on I did learn Clojure and spend some months writing a bit of Clojure and ClojureScript. All this while I had been hearing about Rust and silently ignoring it.

I think I had been ignoring Rust because I write C/C++ for close-to-system products for my day job. I thought I was already wrestling with a systems programming language so why bother dabbling with the latest one. Years ago I had invested time into learning D, and then left it alone even though it was very promising. Whenever I needed to write new code for a command-line application I could easily use C++. And that seemed sufficient.

First interesting Rust project

The first project I saw which had me say ‘whoa, Rust can be used like this’ was Moore. It is a compiler for Verilog and SystemVerilog. Having worked in similar proprietary products all my career I know how big and complex these are. I know the challenges of developing large C/C++ products with multiple engineers. Here was something almost as big written by very few people using a completely new systems programming language. I was used to see systems programming languages shine in small low-level tools, and become unwieldy in large products. Rust seemed quite different.

Getting into Rust

I started reading about Rust, and listening to the New Rustacean podcast. This episode about how Rust took some functional programming ideas and implemented them in a systems programming style gave me insights into the design of Rust. I also looked into the documentation on the website and it was very nice. I always felt that the best software system was the most well-documented one. I also noticed that everything about Rust was designed for codebase scalability. Every programmming language gets stress tested when it is used at scale. Rust has things like

• a package manager
• a system for creating modules
• a documentation generator
• a code formatter

All out of the box. These are very useful features for large projects. And such features are still lacking in widely-used languages like C and C++.

Trying to write Rust

I’ll describe this in an upcoming blog post