[Southampton-pm] Learning Rust

[Tim Retout]

Hi all,

Bear with me, I'm hoping this will not in fact be off-topic. :)

Last night, Anton and I agreed that we would learn Rust, more to look
at another language than anything else (at least in my case).  We each
vetoed COBOL and Golang, as I recall.

Rust seems quite different to Perl - the emphasis seems to be on
memory safety (so the compiler prevents dangling pointers and so on).
It has compile-time type checking.  It seems designed to interoperate
with C code quite easily - structs are laid out identically in memory,
which I presume helps.

I've started by reading these links today:

http://www.rust-lang.org/
http://doc.rust-lang.org/tutorial.html

I've got half an idea in mind that an NNTP reader might be a useful
project... a bit old school, but there are NNTP interfaces to lots of
mailing lists, and networking libraries could use a bit of type
safety/concurrency, IMHO.

To preempt the question about why it's good to look at other languages
- it's the exposure to different concepts/ideas that should make it
worth it, even if I don't end up writing any production code using
Rust.  Look at how much the Perl community has borrowed from Ruby
recently!  Or read the stackexchange version:

https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/136133/why-should-i-learn-a-new-programming-language

So if anyone's interested in joining in, do feel free, and we can
compare notes at the next meeting.  I'll post updates here if they
turn out to be interesting enough!

-- 
Tim Retout <tim at retout.co.uk>