My attempts at learning #rust-lang via the exercism.io track
I've been following Rust's development since somewhere in the 0.9 cycle. I am fascinated by its potential, and have read the forums, RFCs, and blogs with abadon. Somehow I never found a good "learn-me-some-rust" project among my work or hobby things, which brought me in the strange position that I could explain the reasoning behind some deep compiler internals (such as llvm intrinsics mapping), but still hadn't programmed a single hello-world in Rust.
When I stumbled over the exercism.io rust track, I finally decided to download a rust compiler (thank you rustup for making that a breeze!). I spent so long not-starting because I hadn't found a "worthy" use-case for Rust. Exercism helped my conquer that hurdle by saying "screw it, at least I'll learn something" The exercises may be toy-programs without any practical usefulness, but in retrospect I think that actually helps: If the problem is trivial, it allows you to really focus on the new language and its pros and cons.
Learning Rust is not easy, but I'd say it is definitely easier than learning to debug an equivalent c/c++ program. the rust compiler and borrowck force you to handle problems at the start, instead of when the bug decides to surface (such as that-one-race-condition-that-only-triggers-on-mondays-whose-day_of_month-is-divisible-by-three, or that-strange-exception-that-keeps-showing-up-in-the-log-but-that-you-never-could-pin-down)
In this repo, I try to not-hide my flailings and strugglings. I hope my openness about my difficulties on this path will help grant insight into the "mind of a rust-newbie", and maybe even help others conquer their own difficulties.
Hack without Fear!
~Jules