Posted on 2024-11-03
I've challenged myself to try and learn Rust this weekend. A long while back I actually did write a chatbot using Rust, but I was mostly just throwing things at the wall. At no point did I ever understand the language or any of what I was writing.
After chatting with a friend about Zig, I became interested in having another crack at Rust. I've been using a lot of Rust-based software recently (COSMIC desktop, the Helix editor) and I have a project in mind that will require me to write a platform-native app with a GUI, so I thought now's as good a time as any to see if I am actually capable of learning a language properly. After all, I've been writing Javascript professionally for years now and I still don't think I really understand it.
I'm following interactive version of "The book" and have also been doing the Rustlings exercises inbetween. So far, my only comment is that I really like Rust. I don't know if it's the language itself or just how well-written the book is, but everything feels pretty intuitive and pleasant to use thus far. By the end of the weekend, if I'm lucky enough to be able to spend all of my time on this, I should have built a multi-threaded web server. That's not something I thought I'd ever do, if I'm honest.
Outside of this one project I have planned, I do also want to start looking at where WebAssembly could come in handy in my day job. I feel like there are probably a few places where we currently use Typescript and could eke out better performance by rewriting in WASM. Time will tell if that's a possibility.