Workshop: 1 day
A taste of Rust
Workshop description
Rust has been the most loved programming language on StackOverflow for 7 years in a row. What's it all about?
Join this workshop to get a taste of Rust! We'll cover the core concepts of the language: structs, enums, traits, testing, key data structures.
The workshop is organised as a series of exercises. You'll be learning by doing! Each concept will be introduced with a short presentation, followed by a hands-on exercise with tests to make sure you've wrapped your head around it.
By the end of the workshop, you'll have built a small command-line application in Rust: a simple JIRA clone that can be used to manage a backlog of tasks.
The workshop is designed for developers who have experience using other programming languages and are just getting started with Rust.
Structs
Structs are the building blocks of Rust programs. We'll cover how to define structs, how to implement methods on them, and how to manage their visibility across modules.
Enums
Rust's enums are extremely powerful: each variant can have its own data! They're an excellent tool for modelling state machines, such as our tasks. We'll cover how to define enums, how to implement methods on them, and how to leverage pattern matching when working with them.
Ownership
Ownership is Rust's most distinctive feature. It's what makes Rust code safe and performant. We'll cover how ownership works, how it impacts the way we write code, and how to leverage it to avoid unnecessary memory allocations.
Traits
Traits are Rust's way of defining interfaces. We'll cover how to define traits, how to implement them for structs and enums, and how to use traits to write generic code. We'll also cover common traits from the standard library (e.g. `Debug`, `Display`, `Clone`, `PartialEq`) and how to derive them automatically.
Data structures
The Rust standard library provides a few key data structures that are used everywhere. We'll zoom in on `Vec` and `HashMap` as our reference examples. We'll review where they fit and how to leverage them in our code.
CLI applications
As a capstone exercise, we'll build a small command-line application to expose our task management functionality. You'll learn how to parse command-line arguments and the difference between library and binary crates.
Your mentor
