Rust: A modern programming environment
I’ve been following along with Rust for quite a while. It’s a pretty neat language which offers the promise of the control (and performance) of C, with unparalleled safety, protecting both against segfaults and against concurrency bugs. I spent the weekend playing with Rust, and the thing that struck me most was not the language itself, but how refreshing the tooling around Rust was.
Rust comes with a build and packaging system named Cargo. I wish every programming language had something like Cargo:
Cargo presents a consistent interface to building libraries and binaries. Any
Rust project’s source can be built with just cargo build. It also provides
seamless integration with the package management system, to add a new dependency
all you need to do is add library = "version" to your build configuration
(Cargo.toml) and the next time you cargo build the library is installed
for you.
Cargo also provides a unified interface to testing, cargo test will build
your project and run the tests for it.
All these consistent UIs for doing basic tasks mean that Travis CI integration
is trivial. Just slap language: rust in your .travis.yml and you’re
done.
Finally, Rust/Cargo make deployment easy by emitting statically linked
binaries. Simply cargo build --release and do what you want with the
binary, e.g. scp to your server and run.
Coming from the worlds of Python, Ruby, Java, or Go there’s so much to love here:
- No need to maintain explicit
virtualenv\ s,cargo buildbrings in the right dependencies for whatever you’re building. - No need to prefix everything with
bundle exec, you just invoke the binary you want. - No smorgasbord of third-party solutions for managing library versions, Rust comes with a complete solution out of the box.
- No XML.
Working in Rust is refreshingly modern. Out of the box all the pieces you need for a real software development environment are just there.
PS: Here’s the thing I made.