‹ Writings
🤖 Programming
Rust the Process
2025-12-24
I’ve been trying to learn Rust for years now, and I finally understand enough to (t)rust the process. Or maybe I should say,
My efforts began in college through reading The Rust Programming Language book, but I was rarely able to proceed past a hump around chapter 4. I think my emphasis on simply reading the book was a large reason for my failures. It’s like when I believed I could ace Math exams by RTFM-ing and skipping practice problems. Fortunately, I’m not that smart.
Meanwhile, college classes and my work with the Michigan Solar Car team continued to exercise my C++ skills. With the solar car team, I did my best to build atop the C++ fundamentals taught in Michigan’s CS curriculum (example). I’d seen most attempts at introducing fancy languages, libraries, or infra fail because it was impossible for such work to endure past a single motivated person’s college tenure. Our team skewed young (think college freshmen and sophomores) so things had to remain within their grasp.
My work at SpaceX continued to lean heavily on C and C++. Our use of C++ was pretty measured, with some flexibility about when code had to be strictly flight-software-deterministic versus memory-sticks-are(were?)-cheaper-than-engineers. New ecosystems like Go and Rust occasionally flared up, but rarely went mainstream in the networking/flight software groups for a number of reasons. By the time I quit SpaceX, the language holy wars debates continued to wreak havoc popcorn emojis across software fiefdoms.
So this year, I began a more intentional effort to write more than just read Rust. My rustacean friends wouldn’t stop raving about it and the systems programming ecosystem is certainly embracing it.
I began with rustlings — a good way to get up to speed on syntax and basic programming patterns, though the exercises didn’t truly make me feel comfortable writing Rust. I felt the itch to work on a “real” project where I could still fall back to some guided help on language features.
... continue reading