Finished Rustlings!

Date: 2022-04-09
categories: rust;
Image of Rustlings Course Completion

I've been picking away at Rust for a few years but never took the time to work all the way through the rustlings course until now. It's got a few rough edges (exercises vary wildly in difficulty) but I wish something like this was available for more programming languages.

Rust has a really steep learning curve but I definitely like the language and increasingly want to use it. While it's usually positioned as a systems language, it seems perfectly suitable to general purpose programming once you get used to it. Certainly it's just as productive as something like C#, and the compiler prevents so many errors that in the long haul I think it might be more productive than most programming languages.

These are my comments on the Rustlings course:

  1. Fantastic idea. I think this sort of course would be helpful for learning lots of different languages and frameworks.
  2. Varying difficulty. The exercises seemed to jump around quite a bit. It would be nice if they had a more consistent progression.
  3. Not comprehensive enough to serve as an introduction. You need to have already learned the basics of Rust before embarking on this course.
  4. Some exercises were puzzling. Despite having the tests, it wasn't always clear what was being asked. Some more explanation in comments would be helpful.
  5. What does good look like? There are no official samples of the completed project. It's hard to know if there's a better way to solve some of the problems, and would be nice to have some examples to refer to after completing the exercises.

I plan to use Rust more often for upcoming projects.