Going through some exercises on basic Rust syntax and ownership. Links: Exercises: https://101-rs.tweede.golf/A1-language-basics/mod.html, Slides: http://artificialworlds.net/presentations/rust-101...

cross-posted from: https://diode.zone/videos/watch/9766d1f1-6018-48ec-ad67-e971758f8a3a

Going through some exercises on basic Rust syntax and ownership.

Links:

Rust 101 is a series of videos explaining how to write programs in Rust. The course materials for this series are developed by tweede golf. You can find more information at https://github.com/tweedegolf/101-rs and you can sponsor the work at https://github.com/sponsors/tweedegolf . They are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This series of videos is copyright 2023 Andy Balaam and the tweede golf contributors and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

These videos are roughly on track with the Reading Club apparently, so this video belongs here this week, I think.

  • maegul (he/they)MEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    So getting setup to actually attempt these exercises yourself before seeing the answers in the video takes a little bit of work.

    Having just got set up, I’ll share the process here. What’s nice about it is that it seems to be kinda TDD exercises … ie you run cargo run, which runs some tests, which fail, and you have to fix things until tests pass or compilation can happen. Not a bad way to write exercises IMO.

    But it does require a few steps to set up the repo, which also seems to be somewhat over engineered for an introductory course (just some friendly feedback there Andy if you’re reading this).

    You can see their “official” docs on this here: https://101-rs.tweede.golf/0-install/mod.html

    • Have cargo installed (basically use rustup, see “The Book” or the docs linked above)
    • Clone repo at: https://github.com/tweedegolf/101-rs
    • Build the materials (this is basically compiling a rust program to then put the materials together from the raw content in the repo):
      • Create a directory for where you want to dump the built materials. I created intro_track/ alongside the repo’s directory
      • From inside the repo (named 101-rs, navigate to ./modmod/
      • run cargo run -- -o target/course -c ../content/rust-intro.track.toml where target/course is the directory you created above for containing these materials.
    • Navigate to course (where materials were dumped). There’ll you find ./exercises/2-foundations-of-rust/1-foundations-of-rust/. In this directory will be numbered subdirectories including 1-basic-syntax and 2-move-semantics etc. Each one is a rust/cargo project and represents a module or something of the course.
    • The idea being, I think, that completing the exercise will be when cargo run works without errors.
    • maegul (he/they)MEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      I missed the last step really.

      So you need to navigate into one of these subdirectories like .../1-basic-syntax/. Which, as I said above, is a rust/cargo project.

      From there, you run cargo run to see if it compiles (it likely won’t until you fix the code, which is the exercise).

      OR, you run cargo test to run the tests (which, again, will likely not pass).

      If the project has mulitple files, each being their own exercise, then you have to use --bin to specify which file/bin you want to run. EG: cargo run --bin 01 for a file named 01.rs. Or, cargo test --bin 01 for the tests in a file named 01.rs.

    • maegul (he/they)MEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Another interesting to note here is there’s a basic introduction to writing and running tests in rust!

      As you’ll see in the video, Andy himself seems to be a TDD guy and starts writing a test before just completing the exercise.