book VS too-many-lists

mdBook is a Rust-based tool to create Web-based books from vanilla Markdown files. Although it is quite minimalistic, you will bump into it quite often in the wild. Most notably, the Rust Book uses it. I see it quite often in the Nix ecosystem, too.

✅ Code Daily – Practice with small exercises (try Rustlings). ✅ Read the Official Book – Supplement with The Rust Programming Language. ✅ Join the Community – Engage on Rust’s Discord or forums. ✅ Build Projects – Apply concepts by creating CLI tools, web servers, or games.

Read the Rust Book: The official Rust book is a fantastic resource.

Rust Programming Language

Explore the Rust Book to learn more about Rust programming

Rust Book

The Rust Book - Comprehensive guide to the language

Recently I got this obsession to learn Rust. While there are plenty of documentation around, like Rust Book, some good published books, tutorials, rustling, I always struggle to learn something when I am not doing something practical, so I have decided to go to my comfort zone and write a Kubernetes Controller using kube-rs.

My knowledge of Rust is rudimentary at best - if you asked me a week ago I would've told you it was nonexistent. When I started working on this my immediate thought process was to go and "learn Rust" - as in go read the Rust book. I was in the middle of reading what an integer was when I realized it probably wasn't the best use of my time.

The borrow checker rejects loads of sound programs - just read https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Aliasing rules can also be problematic in some circumstances (but also beneficial for compiler optimisations).

And the orphan rule is also quite restrictive for adapting imported types, if you're coming from an interpreted language.

https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/ sums up the main issues nicely tbh.

- Don't always read from the shared variable to avoid contention. Instead, each thread has its own copy of the last value it read which we compare with first before copying and caching the shared value.

[0] https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

[1] https://gist.github.com/lazytype/35b45f3ea81b5c1c5555546fe6f...

As mentioned above, the situation [5], where there is a dearth of material aimed at the practical intermediate level and above, has not improved very much. As an actual example, you can read the divergence between the following materials recommended for beginners to step up and the practical subject matter [15] shown in the above tutorial.

You seem to have a preset opinion, and I'm not sure you are interested in re-evaluating it. So this is not written to change your mind.

I've developed production code in C, C++, Rust, and several other languages. And while like pretty much everything, there are situations where it's not a good fit, I find that the solutions tend to be the most robust and require the least post release debugging in Rust. That's my personal experience. It's not hard data. And yes occasionally it's annoying to please the compiler, and if there were no trait constraints or borrow rules, those instances would be easier. But way more often in my experience the compiler complained because my initial solution had problems I didn't realize before. So for me, these situations have been about going from building it the way I wanted to -> compiler tells me I didn't consider an edge case -> changing the implementation and or design to account for that edge case. Also using one example, where is Rust is notoriously hard and or un-ergonomic to use, and dismissing the entire language seems premature to me. For those that insist on learning Rust by implementing a linked list there is https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/.

Advent of Code was okay until I encounterd a problem that required a graph, tree or linked list to solve, where I hit a wall. Most coding exercises are similar--those requiring arrays and hashmaps and sets are okay, but complex data structures are a PITA. (There is an online course dedicated to linked lists in Rust but I couldn't grok it either). IMO you should simply skip problems that you can't solve with your current knowledge level and move on.

I feel obligated to point to the original cannon literature: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

I started learning Rust and like how the compiler is fussy about things. My plan was to implement the data structures I knew, but I got stuck at the singly linked list's remove() method. I've read the book as well, but I have no clue how to simplify this further:

My impression from the article is that Zig provides several different hashtables and not all of them are broken in this way.

This reminds me of Aria's comment in her Rust tutorial https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/ about failing to kill LinkedList. One philosophy (and the one Rust chose) for a stdlib is that this is only where things should live when they're so commonly needed that essentially everybody needs them either directly or to talk about. So, HashTable is needed by so much otherwise unrelated software that qualifies, BloomFilter, while it's real useful for some people, not so much. Aria cleaned out Rust's set of standard library containers before Rust 1.0, trying to keep only those most people would need. LinkedList isn't a good general purpose data structure, but, it was too popular and Aria was not able to remove it.

Having multiple hash tables feels like a win (they're optimized for different purposes) but may cost too much in terms of the necessary testing to ensure they all hit the quality you want.

> Cyclic references can be dealt with runtime safety checks too - like Rc and Weak.

Indeed. Starting out with code sprinkled with Rc, Weak, RefCell, etc is perfectly fine and performance will probably not be worse than in any other safe languages. And if you do this, Rust is pretty close to those languages in ease of use for what are otherwise complex topics in Rust.

A good reference for different approaches is Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/