Tag: book

This book arises from my frustration of not finding modern, clear and concise teaching materials that are readily accessible to beginners like me who wants to learn a bit on how to create their own programming language.

There is more to a programming language than the language itself: tooling is a key element of the experience of using the language.
The same applies to many other technologies (e.g. RPC frameworks like gRPC or Apache Avro) and it often has a disproportionate impact on the uptake (or the demise) of the technology itself.

Tooling should therefore be treated as a first-class concern both when designing and teaching the language itself.

The Rust community has put tooling at the forefront since its early days: it shows.
We are now going to take a brief tour of a set of tools and utilities that are going to be useful in our journey. Some of them are officially supported by the Rust organisation, others are built and maintained by the community.

Zero To Production is a book that I will be writing in the open, publishing one chapter at a time on this blog.

The Rust ecosystem has had a remarkable focus on smashing adoption barriers with amazing material geared towards beginners and newcomers, a relentless effort that goes from documentation to the continuous polishing of the compiler diagnostics. There is value in serving the largest possible audience. At the same time, trying to always speak to everybody can have harmful side-effects: material that would be relevant to intermediate and advanced users but definitely too much too soon for beginners ends up being neglected.

I struggled with it first-hand when I started to play around with async/await. There was a significant gap between the knowledge I needed to be productive and the knowledge I had built reading The Rust Book or working in the Rust numerical ecosystem.

I wanted to get an answer to a straight-forward question: Can Rust be a productive language for API development? Yes. But it can take some time to figure out how. That’s why I am writing this book.

This book is targeted towards experienced programmers that already feel somewhat comfortable with vanilla Rust (you definitely do not need to be an "expert" though, I certainly am not) and would like to dip their toes into its async ecosystem.

As the title indicates, this is not so much a book about how to use async Rust as much as it is about trying to build a solid understanding of how it all works under the hood. From there, efficient usage should come naturally.