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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I find that a lot of people just pick wrong kinds of projects to dig their teeth into Rust with. It is a systems programming language. If you don't know much about it and set out to build a website, things are inevitably going to go south.

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One of my first projects involved linked lists. Oh boy was that the right wrong project to start with.

I've never written linked lists the same way in other languages since.

Rust made me better in languages that aren't Rust.

Hah, yes. I thought I'd get started with Rust going through building some basic data structures. Linked lists were near the top of my list so I didn't get very far with that first approach XD

If you really meant this, and you ever want to learn Rust, you could do worse than begin with Aria's "Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists"

https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

You can skip her explanation of why the Linked List is a bad first data structure, and get straight to doing, but if you have no idea why a very experienced programmer would think this data structure is terrible (so terrible she tried but failed to have it removed from Rust's Standard Library before Rust 1.0) you should read her whole PSA too.

I didn't end my Rust learning with that. I did a bit of a deep dive into articles about linked lists in Rust out of curiosity before pivoting to more fruitful projects. My favourite "project" being last year's Advent of Code.

Yeah, that's familiar. I chose for myself a project in which the data structure was a tree that should be generated randomly, but under some constraints. Also I tried to write it using functional paradigms, using many closures. I hit so many walls doing that that when it sort of worked, finally, I never wanted to touch Rust again.

Actix and Axum are so easy. They're a drop in replacement for Golang or Flask.

I'd encourage people to start their Rust journey with little web services.

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