So I have been programming as a hobby for 5 years now, and most of it has been web dev. I have done React, Vue, React’s metaframeworks like Next, Remix and a lot more and quiet frankly I have become tired of it. I have always wanted to try something new and exciting. And for a lot of time I wanted to into game development. I quicky realised that it is not for me given my low level pc. So I tried getting into low level languages, and thought of starting with rust.

First Expressions

A general experience of mine with programming languages has been that “if you learn 1 it should not be hard to get into others”, and to some extent, I agree with it. I learnt python first, and transitioning into javacsript was very easy and transitioning into golang was smooth as well. Unfortunately I cannot say the same about Rust.

Let us take a look at this code for initialising a discord bot with serenity and poise.

    let framework = poise::Framework::<Data, Error>::builder()
        .options(poise::FrameworkOptions {
            commands: commands::get_commands(),
            manual_cooldowns: true,
            prefix_options: poise::PrefixFrameworkOptions {
                prefix: Some("?c".into()),
                case_insensitive_commands: true,
                ..Default::default()
            },
            ..Default::default()
        })
        .setup(|ctx, _ready, framework| {
            Box::pin(async move {
                builtins::register_globally(ctx, &framework.options().commands).await?;
                ctx.data
                    .write()
                    .await
                    .insert::<MongoClientKey>(Arc::clone(&mongo_arc));
                Ok(Data {
                    mongo: Arc::clone(&mongo_arc),
                })
            })
        })
        .build();

If I would have seen this code without knowing anything about Rust, I would have lost my mind completely. Box, Arc, move, Ok, insane usage of < > and ampersand made me kinda scared.Rust, being a strongly typed language, generally does not allow you to loosely type anything. You are not allowed to print everything, most things do not have a implementation for println!. When starting out, rust can seem kinda hellish. And this was the first insantce in a very long time that I was motivated to learn something new.

Thoughts

The first project I made with rust was this fetch script. It was a great introductory project for me. Learnt a lot about the basics and some built in stuff. Next I built a discord bot that can be used to host quizes called linear. I would like to take the moment to appreciate the work of serenity team on poise, it has a lot of stuff baked in and makes bots easier to maintain. That being said, it was still tough to make a bot like this, mostly because of the code snippet I shared above. I also used mongodb to save data, so I learnt a thing or two about that as well.

I think its package manager, cargo is very clean and easy to use as well. Most of its basic functionalities mimic npm but I felt like cargo is a bit less buggier.

$ cargo add package
$ npm i package

Most of the errors I have run into with rust, is mostly because of mismatched types. And that sometimes get very infuriating to work with. Said that, I am enjoying writing Rust. Working with Some and Result is cool, there are a huge variety of functionalities and utilities baked in and the only thing that is left to you is to make sure you do not upset the borrow checker.

Currently I am working on key value database in rust and I think I will continue to use rust consistently for the next couple of years.