Learning Rust

The past weekend I've been writing my first programs in Rust, which seems to be in vogue at the moment. Mentions of Rust keep coming up on /r/programming and it's obvious why: Rust is a very exciting community right now, with very active development and new libraries landing all the time.

Perhaps most persuasive was Jared Forsyth's seemingly balanced discussion of of Go vs Rust which points out several interesting features in Rust that are absent in Go.

The syntax itself is reminiscent of Ruby (but with braces). As a Python programmer, I've never found Ruby that interesting a prospect. I've learned the Ruby language enough to write Puppet providers, but Ruby as a language occupies very much the same space as Python and I've never seen the need to take it further.

Rust offers some of the same syntactic ideas as Ruby but on offer is a highly performant natively-compiled language with static but inferred types. Rust's pointer ownership model allows the compiler to automatically allocate and free objects in most cases without needing reference counting or garbage collection (though both of these are available too). You could perhaps describe it as a low-level language with high-level syntax. So this is a very different proposition to Python and Ruby, and rather different to C and C++ too.

What I've learned of Rust so far comes largely from the Rust tutorial and Rust by Example.

My first Rust program was an implementation of a simple, insecure monoalphabetic substitution ciphers (inspired, perhaps, because I've already written a genetic algorithm in Python to crack them). I'm pleased that the code ends up clean and easy to read. For example, a snippet that encodes a single character with ROT13 might be

// A function that takes a char c, and returns its rot13 substitution
fn rot13_char(c: char) -> char {
    let base = match c {
        'a'..'z' => 'a' as u8,  // If c is in [a-z], set base to 97
        'A'..'Z' => 'A' as u8,  // If c is in [A-Z], set base to 65
        _ => return c  // For all other characters, return c
    };

    let ord = c as u8 - base;  // ord is in the range 0-25
    let rot = (ord + 13) % 26;  // rot13
    (rot + base) as char  // convert back to an ASCII character. Note no
                          // semicolon - this is an implicit return
}

I also spent some time working out how to call Rust code from Python, which would allow me to use both languages to their strength in the same project. It turns out it isn't hard to do this, by compiling a .so in Rust with the #[no_mangle] annotation on the exported methods, and some simple ctypes magic on the Python side. One downside is that so far I've only worked out how to pass strings as c_char_p which is not optimal either for Rust or Python. Sample code is on Bitbucket.

I could see myself using Rust in some projects in the future, though I'm not likely to stop using Python for the vast majority of applications. The Rust language itself is changing week to week and is probably unsuitable for any production development at this time, but for early adopters it's well worth a look.