Rust the Process

Summary

‹ Writings🤖 ProgrammingRust the Process2025-12-24 I’ve been trying to learn Rust for years now, and I finally understand enough to (t)rust the process. Or maybe I should say, <T>rust the process.My efforts began in college through reading The Rust Programming Language book, but I was rarely able to proceed past a hump around chapter 4. I think my emphasis on simply reading the book was a large reason for my failures. It’s like when I believed I could ace Math exams by RTFM-ing and skipping practice problems. Fortunately, I’m not that smart.Meanwhile, college classes and my work with the Michigan Solar Car team continued to exercise my C++ skills. With the solar car team, I did my best to build atop the C++ fundamentals taught in Michigan’s CS curriculum (example). I’d seen most attempts at introducing fancy languages, libraries, or infra fail because it was impossible for such work to endure past a single motivated person’s college tenure. Our team skewed young (think college freshmen and sophomores) so things had to remain within their grasp.My work at SpaceX continued to lean heavily on C and C++. Our use of C++ was pretty measured, with some flexibility about when code had to be strictly flight-software-deterministic versus memory-sticks-are(were?)-cheaper-than-engineers. New ecosystems like Go and Rust occasionally flared up, but rarely went mainstream in the networking/flight software groups for a number of reasons. By the time I quit SpaceX, the language holy wars debates continued to wreak havoc popcorn emojis across software fiefdoms.So this year, I began a more intentional effort to write more than just read Rust. My rustacean friends wouldn’t stop raving about it and the systems programming ecosystem is certainly embracing it.I began with rustlings — a good way to get up to speed on syntax and basic programming patterns, though the exercises didn’t truly make me feel comfortable writing Rust. I felt the itch to work on a “real” project where I could still ...