I’ve only been coding with Python/Javascript since I started my career. I do APIs and websites frontend. I don’t really understand what is interesting in learning an other language. For example, I could learn Ruby, but I’d do the same thing I already do.
Rust, C/C++ tho seem to me to be languages to code other things. Hence my question : what do you code? If possible, make distinction between personal projects and professional projects.
I wrote a web server to store markdown documents with links between them, a sort of ‘zettelkasten’. Now I’ve made it into a tauri app that runs on my phone, web server and all, and can sync with the main server in the cloud. Documents everywhere! Front end is in elm and not rust tho.
I’ve made a few other projects in rust, did a audio dsp thing that is a delay with web controls, made a blinky sketch for the rp2040.
Rust is cool because you can write pretty high level code in it, with lots of libraries to help out, or you can write bare metal code with no OS for embedded.
I’d love to browse your code. Do you have any of this in a public git repo?
Anything and everything, really.
I wrote an idle inhibitor in Rust, a GUI WiFi connection manager for my wife, an API client for WriteFreely, I contributed to a Wayland compositor (niri), wrote a library & CLI tools to talk to Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards. I wrote the frontend of my personal search engine in Rust too.
But I also built a Tauri application where the backend and the frontend were written in Rust too. No HTML or JavaScript in sight, not in the sources at least.
Professionally, the answer’s the same: if I am allowed to write it in Rust, I will write it in Rust, whether it is a low-level library that talks with hardware, a GUI application, or some web related thingy, or anything inbetween.
Oh! That’s nice. I have a question. Why Rust above all the other languages for web-related stuff?
Again, I do not have any opinion on this, all I know is Python so 💀
I have a project idea so you may convince me to try to code it in Rust 😅
I use Rust mostly because I am comfortable working with it. It hits a sweet spot of often letting me write in a functional style, at often zero or very low cost. It has a lot of high quality libraries, for almost any purpose. And the language itself comes with great things too. Traits, Option, and Result are all things I miss when working in other languages like Go.
It’s also a memory safe language that is also fast, approachable, and has a ton of good documentation. What’s not to like?
The personal project I’m currently working on the most is Nucom, an implementation of Microsoft’s Component Object Model.
The IDL compiler for it, which takes .idl files which define COM interfaces and outputs C/C++ headers/source files and Rust modules, is written in Rust.
Originally, this project was all C++, and everything but the compiler still is (which also likely isn’t going to change since it involves building dynamic libraries which Rust does not do well at all), but I really did not want to go without Rust when writing a parser/compiler type thing because the language is so much nicer to work with.
