My Journey Learning Rust

I’ve been learning Rust for the past few months, and I wanted to share my experience so far.

Why Rust?

I decided to learn Rust because:

• Memory safety without garbage collection
• Performance comparable to C/C++
• Growing ecosystem with great tooling
• Challenge - I wanted to learn something fundamentally different

The Learning Curve

Let’s be honest: Rust has a steep learning curve. The borrow checker was initially frustrating, but now I appreciate what it does.

fn main() {
    let s1 = String::from("hello");
    let s2 = &s1; // borrowing, not moving
    println!("{} {}", s1, s2);
}

Resources That Helped

• The Rust Book - Official documentation, excellent quality
• Rustlings - Interactive exercises
• Exercism - Practice problems with mentorship

What I’ve Built

So far, I’ve built:

1. A simple CLI tool for file management
2. A basic web server using Actix
3. Several small utilities for personal use

Next Steps

I’m planning to:

• Contribute to an open source Rust project
• Build a more complex application
• Explore async Rust more deeply

If you’re considering learning Rust, I’d say go for it. The investment is worth it.