The start: a week of Rust

I've taken a small break to focus on my primary work obligations, and in that time I've had lots of time to ponder. During this time, I flew to Tasmania (737-800) and read through a few preliminary chapters of Manning Publications' "Math for Programmers" (Paul Orland). This book is a real workhorse for programmers who want and know they wish to be able to implement more mathematics into their code, but find the conventional teaching methods difficult to fast-track.

Home now, I plan to spend a week giving Rust a real go from the other Manning Publications book, "Rust in Action" (Tim McNamara). In this time, I'll learn everything with a noble aspiration: "How could this benefit the users of YDP?" (as well as my primary work, and other interests of mine like genetics). Rust is fast, but from what I've experienced, it's cracked and goated with the sauce.

What I find interesting about Rust, is the author's intent is as clear as day thanks to this slide deck I found linked in a Hacker News thread. The language was designed for static, concurrent, well-structured, large systems, and NOT for scripting, casual hacking, prototyping, research or exploration. So why would it be used for YDP? Which is arguably a large project to facilitate EXACTLY what Rust is NOT built for!

In steps: I don't know. Although I really don't know how Rust can be used within YDP, I feel as if a compiled, fast, type-safe language which creates little binaries could be very useful in some way. For example: converting large JSON files into chunked JSON files for quick-iter, running concurrent dataset generation better, or running all the automation infrastructure (like timers, etc). I just don't know until I have a taste.

So, in a week or two, I'll make a follow-up post with what I've learnt from my book, and some ideas on how I think it could be utilized, or not.