Comment by ianbertolacci | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianbertolacci | Hacker News Reader

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Again, the issue isn't data-structures or about them.

The issue is: Can I write something in scratch in this language 1) at all and 2) with some amount of daily progress.

Writing data-structures is a test case of my ability to thing and program in the context of Rust. It serves to answer the question: Can I write a program that implements a well defined, well understood construct so that I may learn the building blocks of rust?

This leads up to an application, the behavior and design of which may not be extremely well defined in the context of Rust and requires more thinking when working out the data-structure in rust.

If the answer to "can I write a data-structure in Rust" is "Ya totally got this makes sense" then writing an application will be relatively easy.

However if the answer is "Wow I did it but there were a lot of pain points and I still have no idea if I've done it in the right or canonical way" then writing an application is going to be very difficult.

> If the answer to "can I write a data-structure in Rust" is "Ya totally got this makes sense" then writing an application will be relatively easy.

> However if the answer is "Wow I did it but there were a lot of pain points and I still have no idea if I've done it in the right or canonical way" then writing an application is going to be very difficult.

I feel like one of implicit points of the OP is that this isn't obviously true: writing a data structure is often a very different type of programming to writing a normal application. Most of the code I write isn't like a data structure, and is definitely not like a really good data structure: I can just glue together such code that others have written (or even I personally wrote once, a while ago) without having to worry about the details that it packages up/manages for me. (This is true in both Rust and C++, the latter of which I use day-to-day.)

The issue is: Can I write something in scratch in this language 1) at all and 2) with some amount of daily progress. Writing data-structures is a test case of my ability to thing and program in the context of Rust.

The point is that it's not the best test case. A better test case would be writing the programs you generally write. It'll still be hard to be honest, but really not quite as hard. I have enough familiarity with Rust to write application code myself, but I'd probably still struggle a lot with writing a data structure if I tried.

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