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??
  • maegul (he/they)OPMEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    An idea for a future challenge: use actix_web (for example) to make a web interface for your diff tool.

    Nice idea (I honestly hadn’t thought of that)! Honestly kinda keen on this!

    Notably, this gives you an excuse to try dealing with refactoring existing code into separate modules - albeit this can be greatly trivialized with a sufficiently powerful IDE. I don’t know what you’ve been using so far.

    I’m just using rust-analyzer (inside of Sublime) so nothing really powerful. What are you using/recommending? … i realise I’m not aware of any “goto” rust IDE. Do IntelliJ have a rust IDE or do people just use CLion?

    • Jayjader@jlai.luMEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      As of last November, Jetbrains have released into their Early Access Program their new rust-flavored variant of intelliJ, named RustRover.

      I have found it very pleasant, from the debugger working as expected to being able to tell it to use cargo clippy instead of cargo check for code hints and warnings.