Rust is not as hard as the topics discussed here!

28

I often felt like "now I understood it!" just to encounter a setback a few days after. But I think it's a matter of practice to get more used to certain things.

Some of my personal "milestones":

  • figuring out how the for loop works (e.g. when working on a value vs. working on the reference),
  • understanding that self-referential structs are impossible (with safe Rust),
  • understanding when to use Arc, Rc, Cell, RefCell, Mutex, etc.,
  • realizing that fn f(&self) -> &str actually is a short form for fn f<'a>(&'a self) -> &'a str (lifetime elision)
  • learning that borrows can end depending on usage rather than lexical scope (non-lexical lifetimes), which isn't something you need to know in everyday programming, but it did confuse me sometimes when some code works and I was surprised that it does.

Especially when I was beginning working with Rust, I sometimes got so annoyed that I cannot hold a reference to something that's inside a struct from within the same struct. Rc / Arc (and RefCell / Mutex) became my friends then.

3 Likes