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Reading clubs check in ... how are we going learning rust with "The Book"?

We've got two parallel streams going here. One is up to chapter 10 on Traits and the other on chapter 5 on Structs & Enums.

How are we feeling about Rust the language?
Any persistent confusions or difficulties?
Favourite features or success stories?
How are we finding "The Book" in general?
- Personally, I think it's good but not great and am definitely reaching out for other learning experiences or materials, lately finding myself going through the Std Lib Docs a bit
- Andy Balaam's Rust Tutorial Series over on peertube are also good and I recently remembered to watch them as I go

Otherwise ... any thoughts or requests on what else can happen here for those going through "The Book"?

I'm thinking of having posts on sets of chapters once the two twitch streams have gotten up to them.
So right now, both have gotten through the borrow checker chapter (ch 4).
The idea would be to have a reading club happen here too ... to allow written discussion/questions here for those not able to make the streams (or who like/prefer written discussion), but also to provide a retrospective for those who've gone through the streams.
Personally, in these discussions I'd post my understanding of the topic, look back on the quizzes to see what tripped me up, or any other practical issues I ran into, and post anything else I may have found that helped me on the topic. Basically to see what I actually learned from that chapter.
Thoughts??
Another thing I can think of is challenges and exercises. I tried one a while back, but I think it was too much/long, so smaller exercises would probably work better for getting us thinking/coding in rust. AoC has come up and there are plenty of others. Would regular posts from such a thing be welcome or helpful??

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ericjmorey

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I was looking for something that's not focused on memory safety at the expense of ergonomics. I was looking at Zig but I watched an interview with Odin's inventor. I liked how he was approaching the language development trying use what has been learned from C and C++ but not trying to be compatible with C in the way Zig is.

The ecosystem is very immature compared to Rust and even less mature than Zig. But I want to keep with it for a bit.

maegul

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Ah right ... makes sense. I don't know how successful languages like Zig and Nim are but it's interesting to see the energy around making a sort of modern C / C++ 2.0.

My feeling around it all, however naive or unworkable, is always that real silver bullet is seamlessly composable features. Where in one ecosystem or "language" you can opt in to a borrow checker, or GC or ref counter or manual mem management, or dynamic or static typing etc ... when and if you please. More and more new languages feels like it might be a dead end at a high level. In this respect, the "idea" of Mojo vaguely made sense to me (I never looked closely at it).

ericjmorey

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If Mojo actually becomes libre software, I'll start looking closer. It seems neat from a distance now, but I won't invest energy on proprietary languages.

maegul

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Oh for sure ... that's why I haven't looked at closely at all.

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