RUST Programming Language - Part II

I spent a few hours with RUST again yesterday.

There's definitely some things to learn with this language.

One thing I noticed, was that the Compiler is really good. Very very intelligent. It can make a lot of intelligent inferences about what you are doing (or trying to do). It will also bark out all kinds of warnings about things.

Cargo
In my previous post, I may have made light mention of something called Cargo. Cargo is a "Configuration Management" facility for RUST programmers. It can build (cargo build), check (cargo check), or build AND execute (cargo run) your program.

It also manages packages, and dependencies. So I think it probably is somewhat synonymous with pip in Python. If you are familiar with yum or some equivalent package manager on a Linux distribution, you can get the gist of what Cargo does from the perspective of pulling in packages you need for your project.

This link is a book on Cargo:  The Cargo Book

So yesterday, I wrote some code from the book I have been using, but deviated the code a little bit, and pulled in a package called strum, which allows you to iterate over an "Enum" object. My Enum object has Coins and Coin values (penny, nickel, dime, quarter) and I would use strum to iterator over this and print out the monetary value of each coin. Nothing super sophisticated, but in this RUST language, you definitely need to learn how to do the basics first.

Match Expression
Another interesting thing is that you can use simple "if / then" logic, but you can also use this more sophisticated "match" expression, or construct. So this is the "higher IQ" way to do matching, for the more advanced or off the beaten path cases (i.e. regular expression searches, etc).

Here is a link on that, which is actually a relative link to a more comprehensive book on RUST that has a lot more good stuff in it than just the Match expression.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/expressions/match-expr.html

RUST Programming Language - Part I

In hearing about this "new" language, I have spent some time this week going through a book called "The Rust Programming Language", which can be found at this link:

The Rust Programming Language

I will have to come back and edit this post as I go through the book, but so far, I have been trying to learn "enough" about the language to understand WHY the language has even emerged - in other words, what it's selling point is, what deficiencies in other languages it addresses, etc.

What do I have to say right now?

Well, it's a Compiled language. It's been a long time coming that I have seen a new compiled language emerge. We have had nothing but runtime interpreted languages for many years now.

It has some interesting resemblances to C.

It has no advanced traditional object oriented capabilities, like Inheritance and Polymorphism. That said, it does support Encapsulation, and this concept of Traits (which up to now, seem to me to resemble Templates in C++ a bit - but I may revise this statement after I get more familiar with it).

The language is designed to be more "safe" than traditional C or C++, the latter of which, due to direct memory access and manipulation, can cause Segmentation Violations, etc. One example of course is References where one thread might de-reference a pointer that another thread might be using, accessing, manipulating, etc.