Things I Learned While Building a CLI Tool in Rust (For Beginners)
Recently, I migrated an internal batch script from Python to Rust. I learned more than I expected, so here's a summary.
1. I struggled with ownership at first, but the compiler tells you everything anyway. The error messages are so helpful that I actually fixed things multiple times.
2. Managing state with structs + impl blocks feels natural. If you're coming from Java, you'll get used to it quickly.
3. The built-in support for cargo test is great when writing tests. It's more than enough without a separate framework.
4. Deployment is just dropping a single binary and you're done. The Docker image size also shrank dramatically.
I'm still a beginner with a lot of room to improve, but having only used scripting languages before, diving into a systems programming language really broadened my perspective. If you'd like to study together, feel free to leave a comment.
4 answers
Yeah, the most appealing part is that deployment is just a single binary. With Python, you'd have to set up a virtual environment and deal with all sorts of dependencies.
Ownership really feels like a wall at first, but once you get used to it, it actually makes you write safer code. When I started, I just did what the compiler told me, and patterns naturally emerged. For beginners, the best thing is to just start a small project and build the habit of reading error messages.