Oxide

I just finished sections 24 to 36 of chapter 4 of the Rust book. Here’s what I felt:

• The crates and modules system to organize projects is simple and intuitive.

• Attributes remind me of Java Annotations.

• Associated types seem like an improvement over generics. They seem like an important concept to write effective Rust code and I wish that this chapter had gone into more details and had a larger example.

• Rust supports macros. As the chapter mentions, I probably wouldn’t write one unless I absolutely had to. If Rust supported variable number of arguments to functions one could probably implement vec! using that plus generics.

• unsafe seems like a very powerful and tricky Rust feature. I wish the chapter had an actual example that demonstrated how to use unsafe correctly. And also an example of when not to use unsafe — for example when you’re writing bad Rust code and using unsafe to mask a bad design.

(You can find my thoughts on the previous chapters / sections here)