Rust interviews questions

A few days ago this blog entry sparkled a big discussion on Reddit, and it got me thinking that I just couldn't be relying on my 20 years experience in professional programming if I ever needed another job. I need to practice small, low level coding problems.

So of course I decided to use Rust. I'm putting my code on Github so feel free to have a look if you're interested. I tried to not look at existing resources, I'm sure you can find plenty of Rust interview answers and toy problems if you look around :-).

First I tackled some array operations like finding and removing duplicates, implementing quicksort, etc. I just used Vec and implemented the algorithms only. In some cases of course a Set is what makes sense (finding duplicates) so I just used another vector as a set, of course implementing an efficient integer set would a good problem too. Here I didn't run into any major issue.

The second (and last, for now) thing I did is to implement a Linked List from scratch. The list owns its values of course, so implementing pop/push methods and iterator support proved "interesting"! Now I really had to understand the borrow checker, owning vs referencing, etc. I even tried to do thing using unsafe code like Box::into_raw! And? Well, my program... crashed. I think I'll tread carefully if ever I need to use unsafe.
In the end, mem::replace was my savior. I could get and own a cell from my list by swapping it with an empty cell, do whatever I needed to do, and reset the cell to a proper value. That worked a charm!

So, I'm still happy enough with Rust. The error messages are for the most part clear enough to be able to understand, I do find enough on the web between the official docs and Stack Overflow to save me from being stuck. Rust is good!

Happy Rust Hacking!