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Comment by zppln | Hacker News Reader

I haven't written a lot of Rust, but every time I do I find myself trying to do something rather basic, google around a bit, only to have people telling me to just install crate so and so. While I do see the advantages of this and all, it also stops me from learning the basics.

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You need to communicate clearly that you are doing these things as a learning exercise, not just because they're a requirement for something bigger that you're actually trying to do. People try to be helpful by saving you unnecessary work, not realizing that the work is your actual goal.

If I understand what you're saying, this is to be expected from any mature ecosystem:

The basic things have been solved by libraries that everyone generally prefers to use.

Wanna write a JSON parser? You can, but there's a library for it. And so on.

For the purpose of learning the basics, you can either disregard the library, or you can write an app that uses a bunch of libraries.

Disregard the crate, write your own thing. Then have a look at the crate and compare notes. That’s how you learn. Just pretend they don’t exist for a while. This attitude has some other uses, too.

It's worth reinventing the wheel for the purpose of learning those low-level bits, if that's something you want to learn. For example, I feel like every week I see a new NES or Gameboy emulator posted on /r/rust

The nice thing about well-solved problems in libraries is that you don't have to learn how to write those things if you don't want to

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