My Experience Building a CLI Tool with Rust
Recently, I built a simple file conversion CLI while studying Rust.
During the design phase, I decided to use structopt and serde. The hardest part during implementation was error handling, but the Result type and the ? operator turned out to be very convenient.
Also, thanks to Rust's ownership system, I was able to develop without worrying about memory leaks.
Lessons learned:
- The cargo ecosystem is richer than I thought.
- Actively using pattern matching makes the code cleaner.
- I spent a lot of time catching build errors at first, but after getting used to it, it became stable.
I hope this helps those working on similar projects.
3 answers
Oh, that's awesome lol. I'm studying Rust too, and it helped.
Wow, I also made a similar file conversion CLI before, and error handling was a real headache. But using the ? operator definitely made it easier. Cargo is pretty good too. I used clap though, and I'm curious how it compares to structopt.
Well, I get that Rust CLI is great, but for small projects, why not just use Python? Unless the goal is to learn Rust itself.