tinkering.xyz

Although not really what they were intended for, somebody used annotations to provide a macro system [0]. [0] https://tinkering.xyz/abusing-type-annotations/

For anyone else looking into Rust, I've been experimenting in it for the past month. Heres my thoughts: It advertises itself as a systems level language for the new age, but to me it feels like a functional language in disguise. The borrow checker enforces an unchained functional style (You may have 1 unique mutable reference or may have many immutable references). This sounds bad if you're used to pointer slinging, but once you get used to the peculiarities I find it forces me to write better quality code. The package management is the most refreshing feature. It's a pain to rewrite my personal libraries in each language I use, but I found that most of the things I needed were already available at higher quality than I would have done. (And using them is a single config line). For a 'low level language' they make it pretty hard to do some 'low level' things. Example's I've found include: * writing a doubley linked-list. Consensus is "don't use linked-lists. The stdlib has better tools * Reading a file into a struct. They make it surprisingly difficult to say "hey, read these 10 bytes, its this struct". Consensus is to use more structured file formats like json or protobufs. There's libraries for reading those things. Error handling is similar in style to Go, but it get rid of a lot of the boilerplate. The '?' operator effectively acts as if err return err. The macro system is really nice. I don't write many macros, but it does mean I can use other people's powerful…