Rust

These days, Rust is hands down my favorite programming language. I think traits are a vast improvement over C++'s flavor of OOP and polymorphism; I love Cargo, the included build system and package manager; and overall I just find it a much more enjoyable language to use, more so than even Python. It was pretty difficult to get used to, but the lessons I've learned along the way have been invaluable.

The ecosystem

The build ecosystem for Rust is extremely user friendly, really only requiring you to specify any dependencies in a project manifest file Cargo.toml. Projects can be initialized with cargo new <name> to make a new binary application project structure, or cargo new --lib <name> for a library (you can of course change this, or have a bin and a library together, or even have subprojects within the outer project structure).

Crates

Rust projects are called crates and provide a very simple way to include other libraries in a way similar to JavaScript projects using npm, or Python with pip. cargo being the main command for initializing, building and running Rust projects is also the tool to use to add crate dependencies, with cargo add <dependency> (this though requring the cargo add extension to be added). Manually dependencies are added by editing the project manifest file.

Finding libraries to use is also as simple as searching on lib.rs, or crates.io.

The language

Pattern Matching

fn plus_one(x: Option<i32>) -> Option<i32> {
  match x {
    None => None,
    Some(i) => Some(i+1),
  }
}

println!("{:?}", plus_one(Some(5))); // Some(6)
println!("{:?}", plus_one(None)); // None

Basically borrowed into.

Foreign Languages

Dealing with foreign languages is inevitable for some applications, but in particular with games using Rust wrappers for C rendering libraries. The std::ffi module provides many utilities for handling data across languages.

Strings and C strings

Strings in Rust are not zero terminated, so calling C functions expecting zero terminated C strings is at first a problem. Thankfully ffi provides the following:

• OsString: Owned, mutable platform-native strings.
• OsStr: Borrowed reference to OsString object.
• CString: Owned, C-compatible, nul-terminated string with no nul bytes in the middle.
• CStr: Borrowed reference to CString object.