In this episode we turn the spotlight on the Rust programming language.
Kevin has been dabbling with it recently and shares his experience of exploring what Rust has to offer.
"Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety" - rust-lang.org
Len and Kevin pick apart some of language features, the type system, memory safety, thread safety, platforms and its steeper learning curve. We make plenty of casual comparisons between different features of Rust and various other programming languages, including C, C++, Ruby, Java & Go.
We also chunk up a bit higher and explore real life use cases like Servo (an HTML rendering engine), Diesel (an ORM that compiles the schema into your type system), Skylight (a Rails instrumentation service) and a few other hypotheticals we found.
After that we check out the great documentation created by Steve Klabnik, exploring the pros and cons of executable comments. We discuss the basic tooling and package management system too.
Our discussion then turns to their release process, the adoption of semver in the community, and whether it is a good bet for writing production systems.
If you use Rust in production, or know somebody who does, please submit an issue on our ping repo for a future show!
Useful links:
- https://www.rust-lang.org
- http://servo.org
- https://github.com/wycats/rust-activesupport
- https://github.com/sgrif/diesel
- http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blog/2016/1/10/two-weeks-rust/
- http://arthurtw.github.io/2014/11/30/rust-borrow-lifetimes.html
- http://arewewebyet.com/
Picks
- Kevin
- Kenneth
Thanks for listening!
See all past picks on our picks page.