Catch my Rust!

After JavaScript, Ruby, C++ and Python I had to try out a new programming language again. I’ve been wanting to play around with Mozilla’s Rust for quite a while but when I looked into it a year ago the language seem too weird to get a hold of its concepts. Rust felt like basically every syntactical concept was done differently than I would have expected, knowing other languages. Also, it was pretty inconvenient to get it to install on archlinux. Especially after hearing about several major changes in the architecture of the language and its objectives (moving away from garbage collection and dropping of green threads) it seemed like there was too much changing to get in now, so I waited.

With the launch of Rust 1.0, I had to give it another chance, the language was being discussed all over the place. Some people claimed rust would look and feel like ruby, I beg to differ. It was tremendously harder to write a simple piece of software in rust than in ruby. At least to me in the beginning. My objective was to reproduce my catch my bus script in rust. The cool thing about rust was that it comes with a packagemanager/buildsystem called cargo. It feels like a mix of cmake and ruby gems. Since there were several high profile projects already on the move I could already profit from a repository of crates (like gems in ruby) to help me in the process.

Catch-my-bus is a bit like an advanced Hello World to me. It’s not meant to be a full fletched tool, even though it has been turned into one. It calls a webservice, parses some json and produces regular reminders. This can be done quite simply in ruby, using the right gems. In rust, the webservice and parsing part was relatively easy too, since there are already libs like hyper and rustc-serialize. Since Mozilla is developing Servo in Rust you can expect to find excellent implementations for what ever a browser uses too. The missing component was the notification part.

I researched into what had been done in that area and it seemed unsatisfactory. Though some people already implemented bindings to libnotify. So I decided to invest some time and do my own. Now there are 3 crates on crates.io that offer this functionality, however I can savely say, mine is the best documented and also the only one that does not rely on ffi bindings to C \0/.

Since I released my crate it has become my main rust project for a while, so my catch-my-bus in rust is still not where I wanted it to be originally, but since the compeeding implementations by Kilian Koeltzsch and Ian extended the original functionality a little I am currently looking into system tray icons in rust. This however is strictly a side-side-project, so don’t be surprised if I drop that and stick with a clone of my original catch-my-bus ᐛ

This was supposed to become a post about rust itself and what I think about it, but, why not make it a series.

Later!