Rust 🦀

This short chapter collects various useful general resources about the Rust programming language. If you are already familiar with Rust, skip this chapter. Otherwise, this chapter is for you!

Getting Help

Rust community actively encourages beginners to ask questions, take advantage of that!

We have a dedicated stream for Rust questions on our Zulip: Rust 🦀.

There's a general Rust forum at https://users.rust-lang.org.

For a more interactive chat, take a look at Discord: https://discord.com/invite/rust-lang.

Reference Material

Rust is very well documented. It's possible to learn the whole language and most of the idioms by just reading the official docs. Starting points are

• The Rust Book (any resemblance to "Guide to Nearcore Development" is purely coincidental)
• Standard Library API

Alternatives are:

• Programming Rust is an alternative book that moves a bit faster.
• Rust By Example is a great resource for learning by doing.

Rust has some great tooling, which is also documented:

• Cargo, the build system. Worth at least skimming through!
• For IDE support, see IntelliJ Rust if you like JetBrains products or rust-analyzer if you use any other editor (fun fact: NEAR was one of the sponsors of rust-analyzer!).
• Rustup manages versions of Rust itself. It's unobtrusive, so feel free to skip this.

Cheat Sheet

This is a thing in its category, do check it out:

https://cheats.rs

Language Mastery

• Rust for Rustaceans — the book to read after "The Book".
• Tokio docs explain asynchronous programming in Rust (async/await).
• Rust API Guidelines codify rules for idiomatic Rust APIs. Note that guidelines apply to semver surface of libraries, and most of the code in nearcore is not on the semver boundary. Still, a lot of insight there!
• Rustonomicon explains unsafe. (any resemblance to https://nomicon.io is purely coincidental)

Selected Blog Posts

A lot of finer knowledge is hidden away in various dusty corners of Web-2.0. Here are some favorites:

• https://docs.rs/dtolnay/latest/dtolnay/macro._02__reference_types.html
• https://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2019/02/07/rust-a-unique-perspective.html
• https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2018/02/01/in-rust-ordinary-vectors-are-values/
• https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2016/10/02/observational-equivalence-and-unsafe-code/
• https://matklad.github.io/2021/09/05/Rust100k.html

And on the easiest topic of error handling specifically:

• http://sled.rs/errors.html
• https://kazlauskas.me/entries/errors
• http://joeduffyblog.com/2016/02/07/the-error-model/
• https://blog.burntsushi.net/rust-error-handling/

Finally, as a dessert, the first rust slide deck: http://venge.net/graydon/talks/rust-2012.pdf.