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Comment by HacklesRaised | Hacker News Reader

I did ok with Rustlings and I read the 'The Book', I'd say I am largely struggling with async and lifetimes.

I have spent most of my career in C, C++, Objective-C and have recently tried Zig, which I enjoyed, possibly because of it's brevity, and I read through the Jakt programming language docs, which was much more familiar to me but I think if you only used Rust with ARC it would be a simple language to adopt so that's not really a fair comparison.

I think what I really need is a project rather than learning resources, with time being our greatest enemy, I need motivation to get over the hump so to speak.

(Like I said, I might not be smart enough, or I might just be profoundly lazy).

Thanks for your reply.

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I've been leraning rust with a pet project of mine (an Apple2 emulator). That was a bit too complex for a start as I had threads and a bit of architecture to structure my code correctly. But in the end, I know understand how rust does threads and memory allocation and I'm now much less intimated by the type system. I still don't get the lifetimes.

Moreover, a lot of the libraries in rust needs you to understand the type system thoroughly sometimes to use them, and some of them use the typesystem to enforce some specific behavior (without telling you :-)). For example, the logger mechanism in rust makes it very hard to dynamically change the logger implementation at run time but it doesn't explain why (in the end, I think it has to do with thread safety, but I'm not sure).

It took me about the equivalent of 30 full days to get there. Although I'm an experienced programmer (C++,assembly,Java,python,R), the last 15 years have been python 99%. Had I continued with C++ all those years, I'm sure I'd understand rust much better.

So, just keep going and really listen to the borrow checker. The thing is really smart and sometimes, after a lot of pain, you understand that your own mental model was wrong :-)

> Moreover, a lot of the libraries in rust needs you to understand the type system thoroughly sometimes to use them, and some of them use the typesystem to enforce some specific behavior (without telling you :-)). For example, the logger mechanism in rust makes it very hard to dynamically change the logger implementation at run time but it doesn't explain why (in the end, I think it has to do with thread safety, but I'm not sure).

Mainly because logger is a static value, if you really want to change your logger at runtime, then you have to pay a little bit for synchronization (i.e. locking with mutex), other than that, it's not that hard.

There are some very practice oriented books for rust: zero to production, rust in action. And a third one that I didn’t read, it is game programming focused and seems pretty good. Something with “handmade”.

I believe the game programming one you are thinking of is “hands on rust” by Herbert Wolverson. I haven’t read all of it, the parts I have read are quite good but I’m not big into games so I switched over to rust in action.

That's actually one of the reasons that I asked. I am the author of Rust in Action and wondered if the person having trouble had investigated one of the more practical resources.

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