Learning Rust #9: A talk about rustlings

Last December I finally started learning Rust and in January I built and published my first app with Rust: 235. Learning Rust is my monthly blog series that is defnitely not a tutorial but rather a place for me to keep track of my learning and write about things I've learned along the way.

Learning Rust series

• Learning Rust #1: Pattern Matching
• Learning Rust #2: Option & Result
• Learning Rust #3: crates.io & publishing your package
• Learning Rust #4: Parsing JSON with strong types
• Learning Rust #5: Rustlings
• Learning Rust #6: Understanding ownership in Rust
• Learning Rust #7: Learn from the community
• Learning Rust #8: What's next?
• Learning Rust #9: A talk about rustlings (you're here)
• Learning Rust #10: Added new feature with a HashMap

Rust Finland meetup 9.5.2022

Lightning talk: rustlings

I got to host Rust Finland's first in-person meetup since the beginning of the pandemic at Futurice on Monday May 9th and ended up doing a short lightning talk about rustlings and even experiment a bit with live coding / ensemble programming style with the audience.

The talk can be found on my Youtube channel at Juhis Talks Tech and is 8.5 minutes long.

I've also written about rustlings earlier in this series in Learning Rust #5: Rustlings so if you prefer written stuff, you can find it there.

Good discussions

I also had really good discussions with people. I mentioned to one person my plans at somepoint being to build a static site generator with Rust to see if I could build a nice architecture for a plugin system. I abandoned it partly due to lack of time but also because I couldn't figure out how to get started with dynamically loading Rust plugins into a built binary.

I've mostly worked with Javascript or Python where it's quite straight-forward to dynamically load code because it's just code being run and executed but the idea of including plugin code on runtime while running the binary for the SSG was something I couldn't grasp a good place to start.

I got some good tips for dynamically loading libraries and linking them so I'll have to take a look at that, hopefully during the summer if I find time to work on a new project (or more realistically, if this project will be the one I prioritize my free time on as I have quite a few ideas on my backlog).