Rust: first look

Rust is approaching its 1.0 release.

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents almost all crashes*, and eliminates data races.

* In theory. Rust is a work-in-progress and may do anything it likes up to and including eating your laundry.

Rust has been under public development for a number of years. Many search engine results will lead to obsolete code. That might include this post. I have tried to stick to APIs marked stable but verify against the official documentation. The documentation on www.rust-lang.org is currently incomplete but it is the best starting point.

Version info:

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.0.0-beta.4 (850151a75 2015-04-30) (built 2015-04-30)

How I approached getting started with Rust:

• Decide on an application to write (a simple UDP test client)
• Decompose it into a list of parts
• Figure out how to do each one in turn

A laundry list of disjointed code samples follow in subsequent posts.

2015-05-13: post has been split up into multiple posts for easier reference; use the rust-lang tag to filter.