Writing for MIT Technology Review recently, Clive Thompson described Rust as ‘the world’s most-loved programming language’. It is certainly growing in popularity, and here is some advice for would-be learners.
Rust is quite similar to other programming languages like C++, but because it is newer it has some attributes that C++ lacks. Rust is for low-level systems programming and it is useful for developers conscious of memory safety and performance.
For beginners, it can be pretty tricky to learn but it will still only take a couple of weeks if you already have some familiarity with coding – or a little bit longer if you’re a total novice.
If you haven’t heard of Rust until now, there’s a good reason for that. It is not as well-known as other languages like Java and Python, and therefore doesn’t have as much learning material or article inches attached to its name out there. But there is a community for Rust users if you look.
Community
The best, and most obvious, place to look for that community is Rust’s website, which like other programming languages’ sites is very comprehensive. It includes everything from installation instructions to a ‘Playground’ for those who feel like experimenting.
It has its own YouTube channel and a guidebook that can both be accessed via the website, or you can read its blog and check out use cases if you prefer.
A pretty cool feature you might look into when you’re more experienced – or Rusty – sorry, we won’t do that again – is its code contributor. “Rust is truly a community effort, and we welcome contribution from hobbyists and production users, from newcomers and seasoned professionals,” the website says.
Rust does indeed have a growing community of dedicated users, and it is catching up in popularity with the likes of Java and Python. Clive Thompson wrote a nice insight for MIT Technology Review into Rust’s burgeoning popularity; he called it “the world’s most-loved programming language”.
Uses
As we mentioned, the big advantage of Rust is its memory safety. Another is it can be used across different platforms so it’s fairly versatile. It can be used for web development, system programming and even data science tasks. For the latter, it has some frameworks and libraries that enable data analysis.
Tools and other things
We don’t want to bombard you with too many names, but this information might help. These are some libraries and frameworks you can use with Rust.
Diesel is an object-relational mapping library for interacting with databases in Rust. Actix and Rocket and Tokio are very good frameworks for building applications, while Serde is a good framework for data scientists doing data-related tasks using Rust.
Learning path suggestions
As we said, Rust’s own community and website is a very good starting point for learning to get to grips with it. But you can also do online courses on various edtech platforms. There aren’t as many courses out there on Rust as there are on, say, Java or Python, but Udemy has a good selection and freeCodeCamp.org has a learning path for beginners here.
If you want something really detailed to get your teeth into, this online book from MIT may be of use.
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