Good afternoon and happy easter,
I am a newcomer to Rust and recently finished working through your
tutorial. Before I get too much further into reading the standard
library, I wanted to share my experience as a complete Rust newbie
starting out only with your documentation, before I forget it. I
regret that I did not start taking notes immediately, but it was not
yet clear to me how much I was going to like Rust, so a lot of this
will be me recalling my experience, without notes.
First, my background. I've been programming in C++ for 20 years and
used MLton (Standard ML) heavily for about 5 years, 4 years ago. I
have dabbled with Haskell, but not seriously. So, as far as beginners
to Rust go, I suspect I would be the sort of person who should
definitely have been able to go through your tutorial and come out at
the other end with a clear mental model of the language, as I've been
exposed to almost all of the concepts before.
1- I had heard about Rust through the odd talk at ML workshops via
youtube, although the last ML workshop I attended in person was ~6
years ago. The main thing that raised Rust to my attention was your
v1.0 release which was mentioned on Slashdot. A few days ago, I saw a
comment posted somewhere that reminded me about it and contained these
two keywords: functional + no-GC. That got me interested enough to
head over to your main page.
2- I really liked how on the front page there was a feature list that
summarised what I could expect from the language. I was surprised not
to see a bullet point reaffirming that there was no garbage collector
necessary. I then started reading the Rust tutorial "book" in order.
3- Installing Rust on Mavericks worked perfectly and I was happy to
see it supported all three major platforms. I almost made the mistake
of installing the old rust package in macports instead of running the
macports version (0.12.0). From what I've read since, this would have
been a critical mistake since Rust has evolved so quickly in the near
past. Perhaps this package should be either removed or updated.
4- I was a bit annoyed that I had to wade through Cargo stuff before
getting to the details of the language, since I was still in the
"evaluating if Rust is interesting" phase and had very little interest
in packaging minutia in the introduction.
5- Coming from an ML background, I only needed to skim most of the
"basics", taking note of which features were slightly different.
6- The moment I saw "for x in 0..10", I immediately wanted to know if
I would be able to use the ".." notation on my own types.
7- I was again annoyed by the crates/modules/testing sections at the
start of Section 3. I had completed reading the "Basics" section and
had yet to see why I should care about Rust. The key Rust feature,
resource management was still nowhere to be seen.
8- Finally I reached the "Pointers" section I had been basically
waiting to get to this whole time. Then I had to wade through pointer
problems that any C programmer already knows intimately, before
getting to how Rust does things. These two sections, 3.3 and 3.4, are
probably the MOST important sections in the entire tutorial, but they
come very late and are not well described. I would have expected to
see a top-down approach to explanation. A "here is how Rust deals with
memory" and THEN "here is how this solves these problems". Instead, I
got a "here are problems you already know" and then a "here's how Rust
does stuff". Due to this presentation approach, section 3.3 is very
disjointed and I didn't come away from it with a clear idea of how
this all works. It is also very jarring, because the rest of the
tutorial is pretty Micky-Mouse and then suddenly the main new concept
of Rust is explained with only surface detail in two tiny
sections---completely inadequately.
9- I entered the "Ownership" section quite annoyed from the terrible
preceding section. I *still* don't really understand lifetimes, even
after having sorted out the way Rust ownership works. These two
sections are the worst in the tutorial, while also being the most
important!
At this point, I played around with Rust to try and understand the
calling convention, move, copy, and borrow. I am pretty sure I
understand it now, but I did *NOT* come away from the tutorial with
this understanding. I would have presented the concepts in this order:
1. Rust moves objects by default. Include example showing that "let y
= x" makes "x" invalid afterwards. Explain that this ensures that
there is exactly one release to each allocate---something that can
easily be understood even without explaining C pointers. Show that
this applies to function calls as well; let x = Foo; f(x);
println!("{:?}", x); // <-- Bad
2. Explain that some types can be copied instead. Mention that this is
indicated by the "Copy+Clone" trait and show that "let y = x" and
"f(x)" leave "x" valid afterwards. Mention that all basic types work
this way, but that it is an opt-in feature.
3. Show the "#[derive(Copy,Clone)]" syntax which is AFAICT nowhere
mentioned in the tutorial. You can understand this even without
knowing the details of how traits are actually implemented. This shows
a user that he controls the choice between move/copy semantics.
4. Now introduce Box::new(). Explain that it keeps its contents on the
heap, but the pointer on the stack. Trust that programmers already
know what heap/stack are without a bad recap. Demonstrate that move
semantics mean that the heap object is freed exactly once. Perhaps
mention that this is like C++'s unique_ptr.
5. Explain that Box needs a destructor to do the free. Introduce the
concept of Drop. Explain Box can never be marked Copy due to needing
Drop. Perhaps mention that Copy+Drop are the only two special traits
in Rust (is this right?).
6. Maybe demonstrate another, more expensive, type of resource managed
this way in Rust. Mention this automatic drop is something a GC
language can't give you due to the lazy collection of finalizers.
7. Only now introduce borrowing. The existing explanation is fine,
just out-of-sequence.
8. Now explain lifetimes as being a way to promise that the borrow is
shorter than the life of the object or the borrow it came from. I am
still unclear about which use of 'a defines the containing lifetime
and which the contained. So, this definitely needs to be explained
better, but I think it is WAY less important to understand the details
of lifetimes than it is to understand the key concepts of: move vs.
copy and RAII.
This explanation (at least #1-#7) needs to come much sooner.
Definitely still in the Basics sections. Anyway, back to my
first-impression timeline:
10- Sections 3.5-3.7 were easy. One and done.
11- Associated Types (3.8). Why does this come before Traits (3.12)?
12- The closures section was very cool. *After* I understood Traits.
Traits are so important in Rust they need to come first! I was missing
an explanation of what the syntactic sugar of "Fn(int) -> int" is all
about. I only sort-of understood the point about why a closure has
undefined size when returned, but it is fine when used as an argument.
My gut feeling was that it is somehow because you left the scope of
the monomorphized function that produced it.
13- By the time I read "Static and Dynamic Dispatch" (3.13) I was
hooked on Rust. At this point I'd already played around with rustc to
understand the memory ownership concept. The static+dynamic dispatch
is just so elegant, I was sold completely and totally at this point.
MLton has to do escape analysis to determine which closures it can
monomorphize away. That you put this directly under my control and
completely side stepped this issue is just so elegant. Wow.
14- I skimmed over the rest of the sections without any problems.
I have yet to write serious code in Rust, but the confluence of "Just
the Right Ideas" (TM) has pretty much convinced me. The documentation
of the 'std' library looks pretty good, a clear upgrade of the
Standard ML basis library it is came from. ;-) At the moment I am very
hopeful that Rust is the language I've been waiting my entire
professional career to learn.
Thank you for your work on Rust!
I hope my user report can help you improve the experience for the next newbie.
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