Two Years of Rust

I recently wrapped up a job where I spent the last two years writing the backend of a B2B SaaS product in Rust, so now is the ideal time to reflect on the experience and write about it. Contents Learning I didn’t learn Rust the usual way: by reading tutorials, or books; or writing tiny projects. Rather, I would say that I studied Rust, as part of the research that went into building Austral. I would read papers about Rust, and the specification, and sometimes I’d go on the Rust playground and write a tiny program to understand how the borrow checker works on a specific edge case. So, when I started working in Rust, my knowledge was very lopsided: I had an encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of the borrow checker, and couldn’t have told you how to write “Hello, world!”. The largest Rust program I had written was maybe 60 lines of code and it was to empirically test how trait resolution works. This turned out fine. Within a day or two I was committing changes. The problem is when ... Read full article.