I’m learning Rust at the moment, which I’m finding quite an interesting challenge. I agree with a lot of the Rust principles and find it extremely comforting that the compiler has got my back, but it’s bringing me back to my early times learning C and “fighting with the compiler”.

How many hours did I spend adding “&” and “*” to variables to pass into functions before I really understood what it meant for a function to take a pointer? Simple rules like:

1. if a function takes a pointer argument and expects a “simple” data type, e.g. integer then pass the address of a variable with “&”
2. if a function expects an array, then the array variable is equivalent to a pointer already so just pass the array variable
3. if a function expects a double pointer “**” then it expects to change the value of a normal pointer, so treat the pointer itself like a single variable in point 1 above.

During one of his talks, Steve Klabnik stated that he no longer thinks of “fighting the compiler”, but instead considers it like a helpful friend passing warnings about inadvisable behaviour.

I can’t say I’ve reached that stage yet. It very much feels to me like when I was learning C again. Quite nice in a way, reminding me of my roots but on the other hand I find it very un-reassuring. The key is that I don’t understand why the compiler is complaining - I haven’t taken the language rules to heart yet. I’ve read the excellent rust book in its entirity, but this does not mean I know the rules. I know that with time it will come, and the more I use the language the easier it will be.

I have two learning projects on the go at the moment. The first is an attempt to wrap a C astronomy library enabling access to the FITS data format, and hopefully allowing me and others in the astronomy community to start using Rust. The second is a small remote API fetcher, with the idea to run on my raspberry pi with a temperature sensor, and compare the predictions made by weather models to the measured temperature.

My FITS library is up on crates.io, and the API fetcher is on github, comments are welcome!

I look forward to productive times with Rust. As a Python user with a background in C/C++, I like the way Rust straddles the two - the memory safety of Python but without a garbage collector, and the close-to-the-metal speed and efficiency of C/C++. I’ve been looking for a compiled language with RAII that isn’t C++ for ages.