Learning Rust by comparing to Ruby

For the past month, I have been learning Rust. While doing so, I’ve been comparing it to another language I am very fluent in–Ruby. The languages are vastly different and their ecosystems advocate for different use cases as well, but a string is a string. And a struct is a struct. Or are they?

When attempting to learn languages, either because I’m curious or because a project uses them, I go through a mental checklist that starts with the fundamentals. How do I get started? How are variables declared? What objects are available? This seems to cover nearly any language. So this has been my approach to Rust.

In a series of posts, I will cover a specific fundamental and compare it to Ruby, providing as near equivalent code samples as I can. Some may illustrate a point, but those will be noted.

I’m still forming an Archipelago of Ideas regarding topics, but here is a work in progress to give a sense of what future posts will cover:

Getting Started:

• Cover the installers (brew and Ruby’s/rvm and rustup)

• File extensions

• How to run your code

• Debugging:

• Pry and Debug vs dbg

• Look into rust-gdb, and rust-lldb

• Println vs puts

• Eprintln

• OO

• is Rust OO?

• Array vs Vector

• Strings

  • String and &str

• Variables

• declaring types

• Constants

• let

• General structure:

• Classes vs Structs

• Main function vs first line

• Traits vs Mixins

• Modules

• File Structure

• mod vs zeitwerk

• Struct vs Hash

• Tests

• Unit testing

• Integration testing

• Logging

If you’re interested in learning Rust in small chunks, please follow. I will try to keep a regular cadence. And as always, feedback is welcome!