General resources

• Why Rust? See Considering Rust by Jon Gjengset
• Rust Book (introductory book)
• Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development (book)
• Effective Rust (book)

Lifetimes

As a Rust beginner, I understood lifetimes backwards, thinking <'a> means I’m declaring a lifetime which I then use. What that actually declares is a placeholder for a lifetime the compiler will attempt to find wherever that variable or function is used, just as it would attempt to find a valid type for a generic type <T> at the points of usage. In this sense, lifetimes and generics are similar concepts: code is generic over some lifetimes just as it can be generic over some type (thanks to wrs for making me realise this).

• Video by Jon Gjengset on lifetime annotations
• Common Lifetime Misconceptions (HackerNews thread)

Projects

• ZMQ-based real-time streaming with UDP broadcast stream discovery
• https://github.com/mloning/first-steps-in-rust (based on free book)
• https://github.com/mloning/uno-rs
• https://github.com/mloning/rocket-rs
• https://github.com/mloning/zero2prod-rs (based on book)

Ideas for projects

• Command-line Rust
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_philosophers_problem
• Gossip Gloomers Distributed Systems Challenge (video)
• Implement signal processing filters in Rust
• Online multi-player game (e.g. https://github.com/sgoedecke/socket-io-game/)

Debugging

Using lldb

• lldb, included with Xcode on macOS
• lldb tutorial
• Configure custom settings and command aliases in ~/.lldbinit

Useful commands:

• cargo build to build the program
• lldb <program> where <program> is the built binary, e.g. in my uno project: lldb ./target/debug/uno
• help to see available commands
• apropros ... to find help specific to a search term, e.g. apropros breakpoint
• breakpoint set ... (or b), e.g. breakpoint set main
• breakpoint list
• breakpoint delete to delete a specific or all breakpoints
• breakpoint command add to add a command to run when the breakpoint is hit (e.g. printing a variable value)
• breakpoint disable to disable the breakpoint without deleting it
• breakpoint enable
• run (or r) to run the program
• next (or n) to run next line
• list (or l) to list source code
• step (or s) to step into a function
• continue (or c) to continue execution, until next breakpoint if set
• thread until <line-no> run until line number, like setting and continuing until a one-off breakpoint, useful for stepping out of a loop or function, similar to tbreak
• print (or p) for printing a variable
• frame variable [<variable-name>] to print a specific or all variables
• watchpoint for managing watchpoints for watching and stopping based on specific conditions for state of variables

Using Neovim with AstroNvim and nvim-dap

• Install AstroNvim and community Rust language pack, AstroNvim includes nvim-dap, see key mappings
• Launch debugger using key mappings, e.g. <leader>db for setting a breakpoint and <leader>dc for launching the program
• To use lldb commands from above, navigate to dap-repl window in the nvim-dap UI and switch to insert mode using i