Intro
Not long ago I posed a challenge for those of us learning rust: https://lemmy.ml/post/12478167.
Basically write an equivalent of git diff --no-index A B … a file differ.
While it’s never too late to attempt it, I figured it’d be a good time to check in to see what anyone thought of it, in part because some people may have forgotten about it and would still like to have a shot, and also because I had a shot and am happy with what I wrote.
Check In
I’ll post where I got up to below (probably as a comment), but before that, does anyone have anything to share on where they got up to … any general thoughts on the challenge and the general idea of these?
My experience
My personal experience was that I’d not kept up with my rust “studies” for a bit and used this as a good “warm up” or “restart” exercise and it worked really well. Obviously learning through doing is a good idea, and the Rust Book is a bit too light, IMO, on good exercises or similar activities. But I found this challenge just difficult enough to make me feel more comfortable with the language.
Future Challenges
Any ideas for future challenges??
My quick thoughts
- A simple web app like a todo app using axtix_web and diesel and some templating crate.
- Extend my diffing program to output JSON/HTML and then to diff by characters in a string
- A markdown parser??
I didn’t know about John Crickett! Thanks!! For those that don’t know: their home page … and their recommended challenges for rust.
Yea that seems like a good resource for sure. There’s been talk of running through Advent of code here but no one has picked it up yet.
The trick with such things, AFAICT, is to not get too stuck in the details of the abstract problem but instead find a problem that’s solvable enough so that you can flex your rust muscles. I personally found this diff challenge well balanced in that regard but I can imagine it might be either too hard or easy for others. Some of Crickett’s problems seem like they might be too involved, at least for some, and so some curation would make sense.
In the end, the reason why I ask people if they have any ideas, is that writing something that you want to write is likely to work well. I wanted to write a diff, so I did, and my quick thoughts in the OP are also things I’d be happy trying to do. So finding challenges that are interesting to people, from Cricket’s or anywhere else would probably be best.
From the reccomended list of challenges for rust (linked above), the Redis server and git client strike me as appropriate for here … ?