Really basic question - for those of you in here who work with the Pants Rust codebase, what were effective resources to learn Rust as a beginner? I’ve been trying to do Advent of Code challenges using Rust (this was a mistake) and I feel like even very basic stuff is unusually challenging for me to understand.

interestingly enough I’m sitting here contemplating doing this years advent of code in rust for the sake of getting to know rust better 🙂

Lol no worries. I feel like in certain languages it’s easy to just sort of shoot from the hip and just get to the correct answer over time with some iteration (at least, I found myself able to do this with Go/Java). But I feel like with Rust this has been way more of a challenge and I can’t just YOLO my way to the correct solution

lol- interesting, makes me almost more intrigued to try it now 😀

The "official" rust book is a good place to start: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

I’ve always been a dive-in and hope kinda guy :) Helps having a C++ background a decent amount, as there weren’t really any unfamiliar concepts - just variants on a theme with some new grammar. I was able to put a decent embedded system into production in Rust while learning along the way - the rust “book”, and the embedded rust “book” were the go-to resources by a mile. Completely anecdotal - but I found a lot of the misc code online (blogs, stack overflow, etc) weren’t actually that great. Maybe it’s just me, but I got the feel that a lot of those code sources were trying to “show off” how fancy they could make rust. A lot less pragmatic than I’m used to when googling other languages 🤷‍♂️

In the same camp as SJ -- when I joined my current employer, I hadn't written a single line of Rust before, and started on a Rust-only project. First project was writing animation controllers + integrating our ML stack with the engine. Stuff I know very well, so I knew the "flow" but not the language tools to express it... so I wrote a lot of terrible stuff, learned more, and went over the code again the week after with better understanding. But I think you have a good point about the blogs. Learning Rust requires understanding three different things for me: how the safety rules work (sync, send, borrowck), how to best use the functional tooling (sum-types, pattern matching, expr-blocks, ...), and how to effectively write generic code (traits, bounds, lifetimes, and their high-order variants). The most flashy of these are the least useful. I use expr-blocks every day; but higher-order traits? Only for very low-level code. And that's before you even begin thinking about

async

, which is a whole separate beast in many ways. But knowing the first three will at least make understanding async's idiosyncracies a lot easier.

When I first learned Scala I wasted time trying to write "Java-like" code before fully coming around to embracing idiomatic Scala. I didn't want to fall into that trap with Rust, so reading the books, plus working in an existing, well-written codebase, was very helpful.