Brian Douglas in This Developing Journey

Why Rust? From a Rubyist point of view

*I realize there is already a Rust for Rubyst and I highly recommend checking it out if you get any interest in Rust from this blog post.

I first heard of Rust from a coworker about 6 months ago while I was learning GO. My background in programming comes solely from learning Ruby, specifically Ruby on Rails.

Not having a Computer Science degree/background has not hindered me in my career but I have always been interested in learning some more lower level more concepts in improving runtime speed and building impressive Data Structures.

Although I did start programming in Ruby I did complete most of the Harvard EDX course, which starts with basic C. I did not take many notes and skipped most of the assignments. I wish didn’t skip as much now, since I am now using some of that knowledge now I re-learning those concepts now with Rust.

What is Rust?

Rust is a low level systems programming language that focuses on specifically on fast but safe code. Rust positions itself as the new C++, historically a very powerful language that gives authors a large amount of control. The issue with C++ is that is widely known to have unsafe expoitablt vunerabilities.

The majority of web browsers are written using unsafe C++ coding practices. Mozilla, one of the biggest investors into the Rust community, participates in a hacking competition to exploit and discover those specific vulnerabilities.

Rust is a safe language by default and with the birth of the 1.0 (now 1.2) release, the Rust community is growing and gaining more attention from not only Systems level programmers but also high level(Ruby, Node, and Python) programmers who previously saw systems programming unobtainable.

Why would I use Rust and not Ruby?

Hands down the selling point for Rust is it’s speed. Having a low level language focused on speed in your programming tool chain could only help.

Ruby abstracts all the lower level things out of the language so you do not need to worry about them. This is extremely nice for fast prototyping and project code time, but the trade is run time speed.

Languages like Rust, that give back the low level control trade-off on programming speed, but where C++ has it’s quirky syntax, Rust has a nice Rubyesque syntactic sugar that makes it easier to understand compared to C and C++ and could perhaps be not as much of a burden to write in projects (clearly speculative).

// Hello World

fn main() {
    println!("Hello World!");

I was able to see this first hand with the latest release of the Rusting Rubyist while building a HTTP scraper.

With that being said there are a number of Ruby gems being used in production apps using low level C and C++, which makes Rust a perfect candidate to be used in your Ruby gems today and a better way to improve the performance of them.

// Rust Closure Syntax

let plus_two = |x| {
    let mut result: i32 = x;

    result += 1;
    result += 1;


Skylight is one of the first to use Rust in this way in production and have benefiting from speed and memory management for over a year now.

What can I do with Rust today?

My recommendation is to start with the Rust Book today. The documentation is written well and supported by the Mozilla employee Steve Klabnik, who has crafted an easy to read guide.

I found this guide to be unique from others, as it does not start with the in and outs of syntax and low level concepts, but starts with you building small command line programs using rust hands on.

Once you have read through this guide I highly recommend working through the Mike Piccolo’s Blog series.

There is so much more for me to learn on systems programming in Rust, but I have sights on eventually contributing to Rust by trying things out and hopefully building some sort of Slack/Rust integration. I am not quite sure how I will go about doing this, but stay tuned, as it will most likely be blogged about here when I figure it out.

Read my web scraper and guessing game rust code. I also highly recommend the Changelog podcast episode 151 which explains more about Rust.