My journey learning Rust

In June of 2020, I had gotten my hands on a special issue of i'X called "Moderne Programmiersprachen" (modern programming languages). . Scrolling through it, I found many very interesting things and realized just how very badly I had neglected learning new things in my field (which I fully blame on the kids). Because I had some time on my hands (Corona) I decided it was time again to learn something entirely new.

The languages that interested me the most from the ones presented were Kotlin and Rust. Kotlin because of course smartphone apps are something I can show the kids ("yay, programming is soooo cool, daddy"), Rust because I work in embedded programming and it seems to be a true contender to be a real alternative to the decade-old assembler, C, C++ lineup.

I had previously tried a little bit of game development using python, mainly to learn that language a little more, and because I tends to be one of the easier languages to learn and read. Again, the idea was again to get the kids interested in it. As most projects, because of lack of time and the surprisingly low interest of the rest of the family, it had mostly stalled.

So, as I was looking for a project to realize with Rust, I decided to refresh this one and started hacking away. I learned relatviely fast, that the things that interested me the most in Rust, mainly the concept of ownership, require a very different style of coding. So I decided to step back and in our summer vacation, read The Rust Book. I HIGHLY recommend it to anyone who wants to get into the language, in my opinion it does not just teach the concepts and ideas, it is also very well written.

After this, I decided to go in two directions: continue my game project and do the things I do at work, embedded programming with Rust.

In the two subsections you can follow my learning process if you are interested.

Thanks for reading.