Pedal to the Metal: starting with Rust

After hearing for years about Rust, I finally decided to give it a go. This is my journey so far

• Did the whole Rust book at https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
• Did the simple Rustlings exercises at https://github.com/rustlings/rustlings
• Started the Exercism Rust track at https://exercism.io/my/tracks/rust

I'm currently using Visual Studio Code with the Rustextension. It's sufficient for the little exercises I've been doing so far, but I notices that code completion is not very accurate and does not seem to give me everything that's possible.  I've installed the IntelliJ Rust extension in my community IDEA, I'll see how well it works when I start doing bigger projects.

Rust is obviously a different kettle of fish than the last language I picked up, which was Go. It's a lot more complex and rich and hopefully powerful, and consequently takes a lot more time to master. It feels a bit like a cross between C for the low level aspects and Haskell for the structural and functional parts. I was a bit surprised straight away to read about variable shadowing since it seems to take away the security somehow (you cannot mutate a variable but you can redefine it), but from what I read it doesn't seem to be an issue practically since the compiler holds your hand at all time.

Most languages I've worked with have a Garbage Collector, so I'd say dealing with the borrow checker is going to be fun in larger code bases, but so far in the small exercises I've done it hasn't been an issue.

Hopefully I can get productive with Rust quickly, I'd like to contribute to projects like Rusty-Machine to do neural networks and ML with Rust, which would seem a perfect match with its performance and safety. We'll see!

Happy Rust Hacking!