rusty start...
Tags: rust, beginners, environment
Published: 2020-06-21 21:56:38

I heard about rust somewhere in 2017 but that time i picked Go over rust and started reading about it. Go syntax was simple compared to rust and Go seemed natural choice for someone who is coming from Python.

I liked Go but never loved it, that was the reason i could not keep up the momentum to learn it for a long time. Eventually i gave up and just focused on current job and getting used to new country (i moved to new country for job). Once things settled and decided to look for new challenges there were 2 options, Data Science and Some compiled language!

As any sane person with Python Exp. would do, i picked DS and started reading about it but this decision was more from job point of view and not something i wanted to learn so then i was back to square one, which language to pick? Go or Rust or something else? I decided to give rust another chance somewhere towards the start of 2019 and seemed like i read "rust" for the first time, i didn't find it difficult (to read), compiler was nice and official site has nice website explaining entire language. so as you guessed i picked "rust". After reading about some informational material i decided to jump directly into coding. 


> You never learn driving by reading a book or for that matter you learn nothing just by reading about it.


I decided to convert one small shell script which is a wrapper to start/stop/check 2 binaries. Shellscript was perfect for this but this was better task than solving some coding challenge questions. i learned a lot about the language, specially compiler is amazing, errors are clear also it says how you could correct them! I wrote something which worked fine and got it reviewed by putting it on rust community and guess what, ppl actually reviewed the code and gave me inputs. There i actually fell in love with this entire setup then fast forward to 1 year to Feb 2020. In this last 1 year i could never reach beyong chapter 9 of "rust by example" something or other used to come in between and i had to refresh everything due to gap of month or so.

2020 was the year i was looking forward to as i had made some plans but Corona had another plans and my plan was pretty selfish so it didn't work out! that gave me opportunity to go back to learning things, now i am on chapter 14! :). Slowly & steadily i am moving but there is a progress which is important. 

While coding it's important to have a nice setup where things just works and that was my problem, due to Corona, i was using my laptop to connect to office and since Webex has no Linux client and to avoid many setup issues i decided to boot into windows 10 since March and it will stay like that till i don't join office back. This was a issue, i dont really like windows for developing anything (C# was only exception!). I spin my virtual machine and code in that or use WSL but for rust i was not able to find the setup i could work with. Swithing to linux disto was not an option (my grub does not work and i have to change BIOS everytime) so i downloaded Lubuntu but it was painfully slow with 2.5GB ram as a last resort i decided to pick WSL and VS Code which connects to WSL. I have autocomplete for now and i compile manually with Cargo but it's lot better than other setup i tried.

Once i am done with all the chapters maybe in a month, i will write some code around client-server architecture and improve on that iteratively to learn the language, but till then i have to go on with steady pace...