I wrote this small chat-like pair of server/client in order to learn Rust (borrow-checker, lifelines, threads, generics). Rust is kinda hard at first glance (lots of syntax) but its approach in tooling and language is extremely interesting.
😎 Pros:
- No GC but memory-safe
- some good FP constructs (maps for example), nice
- type-oriented language, no bloated classes or objets
- polymorphism and generics implemented in a nice way (
impl trait) where you can add traits to a foreign type (traits are like interfaces) - pretty good type inference but still needs lots of annotations (function params and some generic functions). But I know that inference is hard when using polymorphism
😞 Cons:
- language and tooling is evolving at a fast pace; although transitionning between patch/minor version
is often painless, maintaing a Rocket (for example) project is a pain as it uses
the
nightlychannel, which in turn often lacks some tooling randomly (rlsmainly) - The tooling, primarely
rls(Rust Language Server), is young and somehow the types-on-hover doesn't work great (compared to OCaml, ReasonML or even Typescript). Because of the trait stuff, the RLS often doesn't give which methods can be called or stuff like that. - Compiler a bit slow compared to Go or OCaml but faster than template-based C++
To test this small POC:
cargo run -- server 9000
cargo run -- client 127.0.0.1 9000
cargo run -- client 127.0.0.1 9000