Building daemons and system-level utilities has always been something I have enjoyed. While I have professionally written C code, I have always found it a bit antiquated and unpleasant, like using a screwdriver while everybody around you is using power tools and machines. It certainly still has its place in the world, but there are more powerful options out there. I have experimented with Ada as a system level toolchain, while an all around compelling language it suffers from a severe lack of libraries and doesn’t have a strong community of tooling. Recently I started experimenting with Rust and despite it’s promise, it has been one of the most challenging languages to date for me to learn.

The syntax is not quite like anything else and is nuanced. There are subtleties which are semantically very important. I’m still getting comfortable with the error handling syntax, the importance of expressions with semi-colons compared to those without, and the details of defining structs and their separate implementations.

One of the biggest hurdles I have had is mapping code to documentation for Rust. I remember when I learned Ruby, figuring out how to make ri useful was a major step forward for my ability to understand the code I was working with. I made a similar jump forward when I started to get fluent with Pry and the Ruby debugger (the predecessor to byebug, whose name I’ve since forgotten). This past weekend I got some pointers in the #rust IRC channel to LanguageClient and Deoplete which combined with RLS provide a lot more of the useful in-editor documentation that I had been missing.

With that improved editing experience, I’m stumbling forward a bit more efficiently, but I still find myself missing a REPL like that I have enjoyed in Python and Ruby

I also find myself in need of “Rust as a Second Language” type examples and tutorials. As a very experienced developer, I don’t quite have the patience to tip-toe through beginner tutorials, but would love documentation to discuss building RPC servers, working with data stores, building parsers, or any other of those more advanced but certainly real-world use cases.

I am confident that Rust will be beneficial, but the learning curve has been steeper than I anticipated. :(