Rust

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Rust has a unique ownership model that allows it to guranee memory safety and run without a garbage collector.
From all the programming languages I've come across, rust defenitely has its unique feel to it and requires a different way of thinking.
It has also made me explore design patterns other than OOP (which is taught extensively in schools and colleges)

Highly recommend it if you are interested in high performance or low level languages. Also check it out if you are into high level programming because rust can be quite friendly once you get used to it.

Links

• Rust API Guidelines A nice set of tips on how to design your APIs in rust
• A reddit discussion on what Cell and RefCell does

Cool stuff to know about

• Rust journey to async/await: A cool talk by Steve Klabnik, where he nicely presented the problems faced and their solutions to designing rust's async/await.

Short notes

as_ref

as_ref() has the signature &Option<T> -> Option<&T>

it turns a reference to an Option into an Option that holds a reference

if we siply try to do opt.unwrap(); with a reference to an option, it will complain that it cannot mov out of borrowed content.

We only have a reference to the Option. unwrapping tries to move the value inside to option out of it. which is not possible with shared references.

Error handling in libraries and binaries

When writing a library, Its common to implement the From<MyCustomErr> trait for the standard library Error type. This allows us to use std::Result along with a custom error type that implements std::error::Error. This enables the users of our library to use our error type, the same way they use the standard Error type.
But writing all the implementations can get boring and often quite repetitive. thiserror is a crate that provides a convinient macro to derive the std::error::Error trait for our custom error type.

When writin a binary, using anyhow gives us some nice convinience traits that is implemented for return types like the context() method: which allows us to add custom error messages when our application returns an error. It also provides an Error type that, when used in the main function, automatically formats the errors nicely to stdout