Through Javascript Eyes: Rust

Its been a minute since I’ve attempted to blog something, gosh! I’ve decided to embark on a journey of exploring some new languages and frameworks, starting with Rust. If time allows this will be the first of many such posts. This post will be updated as I progress, keeping all my notes in one place.

Primarily my goal is to explore a few backend frameworks such as Rocket, and brush up my experience with a few old familiars such as Ruby on Rails, Phoenix and so on.

I am specifically approaching this from the perspective of a javascript engineer so my notes will be rooted in that context and from that perspective. For the purpose of this exercise, I am following the official Rust docs.

Anyway, enough waffling, these posts will be in short form and will simply contain notes on things that I find interesting or confusing as I undertake this learning journey. Here we go…

Rust

Notes

• Compiled app runs in all supported environments, without requiring interpreter/compiler setup first, unllike pyhon, ruby etc.
• Variables are immutable by default in Rust, as opposed to js
• Rust also has References, similar to prototypal inheritance in js, but they are also immutable by default.
• cargo docs --open generates and opens offline docs for all used crates. This is pretty amazing!
• The chaining and imports in Rust I’m finding a bit confusing, but as noted much of this requires knowledge of the imported library.
• Rust allows for ‘shadowing’ variables, where you basically redefine a variable which was previously defined. This is a bit weird, but I guess somewhat like extending classes on a micro level.
• Similar to javascript variables are defined with let and constants with const though constants require a type always being set
• Methods can have deeply nested inner scopes (){... {... {...}}} as opposed to javascript which only has contextual scope with hoisting
• Main difference between shadowing and mutable variable is that a mutated variables cannot change type, but shadowing allows it