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Ask HN: What Got You into Rust?

1 points by cloaky233 ↗ HN
Back in 2024 I was experimenting with prosthetic arms and trying to figure out how to build one with an EMG sensor. The problem I kept running into was that the EMG sensor kept crashing the Arduino IDE. It spat out data at an extremely high rate, and my RAM couldn't keep up with it, being on a potato laptop.

That's when I thought, "Okay, maybe let's try Rust. What's the worst that can happen?" This is the first thing I ever built in Rust: https://github.com/CLoaKY233/serial-plotter

I used a sliding window: keep deleting the oldest values and keep pushing the newer ones onto the graph. It looked a bit like a snake chasing its tail, but it's what actually worked for us later at the Smart India Hackathon 2024 Hardware finals (we didn't win).

Sharing something from back when trying something new and building something new felt exciting. Maybe we'll never get to build things quite the same way again :D So I'd love to hear what got you into Rust, what your first Rust project looked like, and what you've cooked since :>

8 comments

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qubex
Nothing: I couldn’t care less about it.
androiddrew
Same, and the fanaticism of Rust practitioners has kept me clear away from it too.

More interested in Zig at the moment.

qubex
I’ve been downvoted to oblivion already anyway so I’ll come out of the closet and say it plainly: I still use C. I’m perfect happy with C and I’m under the illusion that I know how to use it without accidentally undermining a whole system. That is because I’m disciplined.

Oh and I still use K&R style braces, because they make sense to me and thankfully whitespace is worth than a semicolon. Burn me at the stake. I’m willing to be a fossil fuel.

dcminter
I have the dumbest reason I'm sure. As a mostly Java guy for years and years and a C++ guy before that, I happened to be looking around to see if there was a language out there where immutability (final) was the default for variables. That was it, nothing more. Found Rust and liked the ideas, but didn't do anything very much with it - though I even went to one of the early (2016) Rust conferences - and have slowly done more and more with it on personal projects.

It's been interesting seeing how coding agents take to it - candidly they're much better at Rust than me :)

Handcoded projects are mostly a bunch of trivial conversion tools⁰ that I don't bother to share, but I have a little dictionary tool¹ and a UI for my webcam² that went up on my Github. From Agent-coded stuff I have a container manager³ and a VM (QEMU) manager⁴ that I found useful and figured why not share them. All for Linux as I'm a happy Linux user for both business and pleasure.

I haven't found much use for Rust professionally, but it's definitely my language of choice when hand-coding stuff for fun and I seem to get better results with it for agent coding on complex backend and UI stuff too.

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⁰ For example one of them took some text and an outline truetype font as input and then spat out the GCode to drive my 3D printer with a pen strapped to the print head to "hand" draw text. I screwed something up somewhere, though and always had to hand edit some stuff before it was usable - not interesting for anyone without my own very DIY setup.

¹ https://github.com/dcminter/rs-define

² https://github.com/dcminter/zoomies

³ https://github.com/dcminter/lave-station

⁴ https://github.com/dcminter/vm-manager

yodsanklai
Was an OCaml programmer for a long time, Rust is the closest mainstream programming language.