Why Rust?

After years of working with garbage-collected languages, I wanted to understand memory management at a deeper level. Rust's approach to memory safety without a garbage collector is fascinating.

What I've Learned So Far

Ownership

The ownership system is Rust's most unique feature. Every value has a single owner, and when that owner goes out of scope, the value is dropped.

fn main() {
    let s1 = String::from("hello");
    let s2 = s1; // s1 is moved to s2
    // println!("{}", s1); // This would error!
    println!("{}", s2); // This works
}

Borrowing & References

You can borrow values without taking ownership:

fn calculate_length(s: &String) -> usize {
    s.len()
}

Pattern Matching

Rust's match is incredibly powerful and exhaustive:

match value {
    Some(x) => println!("Got: {}", x),
    None => println!("Got nothing"),
}

Current Focus

Working through the Rust book's chapters on:

Error handling with Result and Option
Traits and generics
Lifetimes (the tricky part!)

Next Steps

Build a small CLI tool
Explore async Rust with Tokio
Try WebAssembly with Rust

Rust Programming