mre/idiomatic-rust
🦀 A peer-reviewed collection of articles/talks/repos which teach concise, idiomatic Rust.
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This repository collects resources for writing clean, idiomatic Rust code. You can find a sortable/searchable version of this list here.
Idiomatic coding means following the conventions of a given language. It is the most concise, convenient, and common way of accomplishing a task in that language, rather than forcing it to work in a way the author is familiar with from a different language. - Adapted from Tim Mansfield
Contributions welcome! To add missing resources, please refer to the contributing documentation.
⚙ Projects
Section titled “⚙ Projects”- blessed.rs — An unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem. Suggestions for popular, well-maintained crates.
- Canonical’s Rust Best Practices — A curated collection of best practices for writing Rust code, covering coding standards from naming conventions to unsafe code usage.
- cheats.rs - Idiomatic Rust tips — A list of quick tips to make your code more idiomatic.
- clippy — A bunch of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code.
- Elements of Rust — A collection of software engineering techniques for effectively expressing intent with Rust.
- Patterns — A catalogue of design patterns in Rust.
- Possible Rust — A blog for intermediate Rust programmers exploring real-world code and design patterns.
- Rust Anthology — The best short-form writing about Rust, collected.
- Rust API Guidelines — An extensive list of recommendations for idiomatic Rust APIs.
- Rust by Example — A community driven collection of example code which follow Rust best practices.
🏋 Workshops
Section titled “🏋 Workshops”- Build your own JIRA with Rust — A test-driven workshop to learn Rust by building your own JIRA clone!
- Comprehensive Rust — A four day Rust course developed by the Android team, covering all aspects of Rust.
- Ferrous Systems Teaching Material — Free workshop material produced by Ferrous Systems for trainings.
- Hecto: Build your own text editor in Rust — This is a series of blog posts that shows you how to build a text editor in Rust
- Idiomatic Rust Workshop — A talk/workshop about idiomatic Rust code focusing on effective use of existing syntax and design patterns
- PingCAP talent plan — A series of training courses about writing distributed systems in Rust.
- Procedural Macros Workshop — A selection of projects designed to learn to write Rust procedural macros.
- Rust 101 — A Rust University course by tweede golf.
- Rust Development at Sentry — A document containing useful resources for getting started with Rust and adhering to Sentry coding principles.
- rust-lang/rustlings — Small exercises to get you used to reading and writing Rust code.
📖 Books
Section titled “📖 Books”- Command Line Applications in Rust — A tutorial on how to write CLI apps in Rust, learning many aspects of the ecosystem.
- Command-Line Rust — Learn the language by writing Rust versions of common Unix coreutils.
- Discover the world of microcontrollers through Rust! — An introductory course on microcontroller-based embedded systems using Rust.
- High Assurance Rust — Developing secure and robust software, focusing on embedded-friendly data structures in Rust.
- Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development — A comprehensive Rust Programming Guide that covers most of Rust’s features in detail.
- Rust Atomics and Locks — Helps Rust programmers of all levels gain a clear understanding of low-level concurrency.
- Rust Cookbook — Examples that demonstrate good practices to accomplish common programming tasks in Rust.
- Rust for Rustaceans — Covers how to design reliable, idiomatic, and ergonomic Rust programs based on best principles.
📰 Articles
Section titled “📰 Articles”- Level Up your Rust pattern matching — Advanced pattern matching techniques and idiomatic usage.
- Be Simple — Advocates for simpler, more maintainable code in Rust.
- Pitfalls of Safe Rust — Essential guide to avoiding pitfalls even in safe Rust code.
- Flattening Rust’s Learning Curve — Best practices for learning Rust and reducing adoption friction.
- Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust — Defensive coding in Rust with best practices.
- Prototyping in Rust — Rapid development methodology and idiomatic practices showing how to prototype effectively in Rust.
- Cancelling async Rust — Guide to cancellation safety in async Rust with patterns for resource management.
- To panic or not to panic — Error handling strategies and when panicking is appropriate versus returning Result types.
- Designing Error Types in Rust Libraries — Approaches to structuring error handling in library APIs for clarity and usability.
- The Mediocre Programmer’s Guide to Rust — Practical Rust without perfectionism - a pragmatic development approach.
- Rust’s Sneaky Deadlock With if let Blocks — Subtle lock holding pattern that can cause critical deadlock pitfalls.
- Rust Iterators Beyond the Basics — Advanced iterator patterns for functional programming in Rust.
- The Ultimate Guide to Rust Newtypes — Using newtypes for type safety and compile-time domain validation.
- How to Build Abstractions in Rust Applications — Building effective abstractions in Rust based on software design principles.
- Don’t Worry About Lifetimes — Demystifying lifetime annotations with practical lifetime management patterns.
- When should I use String vs &str? — Guidance on choosing the right string type - a fundamental idiomatic Rust pattern.
- Async Rust can be a pleasure to work with (without Send + Sync + ‘static) — Relaxing trait bounds for simpler async code and ergonomic async patterns for single-threaded contexts.
- Why choose async/await over threads? — Guidance on when to use async vs traditional threading to choose the right concurrency model.
- Three Kinds Of Unwrap — Understanding when and how to use different unwrap variants to prevent common panic-related bugs.
- Practical guide to Error Handling in Rust — Hands-on guide with practical examples for common error handling scenarios in real-world applications.
- Aim For Immutability in Rust — Explains why variables are immutable in Rust by default.
- Compile-Time Invariants in Rust — Shows how macros can be used to enforce invariants at compile-time.
- Rust Number Conversion: Don’t Follow the Book… — A blog post discussing the best practices for number conversion in Rust.
- Hexagonal architecture in Rust — Describes how to build a Rust service using domain driven design and a test-first approach.
- Wrapping errors in Rust — Wrapping ‘reqwest::Error’ and a custom error type as an enum to make library usage easier.
- Aiming for idiomatic Rust — Discusses different ways to solve a popular coding puzzle, ‘balanced brackets’, in Rust.
- Naming Your Lifetimes — Explains how using longer, declarative lifetime names can help to disambiguate which borrow is which.
- Are out parameters idiomatic in Rust? — Discusses the pros and cons of functions returning a value vs. modifying a parameter in-place.
- Guide on how to write documentation for a Rust crate — Writing good documentation with rustdoc including many examples.
- Learning Rust through open source and live code reviews — Covers patterns like ‘FromStr’ and exposing a CLI and a library in one crate.
- Refactoring Rust Transpiled from C — Describes how to lift a C-project that was automatically converted to unsafe Rust to safer, more idiomatic Rust.
- Context-preserving error handling — Explains how to use crates like ‘thiserror’ in combination with ‘map_err’ to add context to errors.
- Rust Patterns: Enums Instead Of Booleans — Discusses how using enums instead of booleans can express intent more clearly in Rust.
- Taking string arguments in Rust — Discussing how to avoid subtle issues with string handling and when to use ‘str’ vs ‘String’.
- Await a minute — Example code for moving from raw futures to async/await syntax to improve error handling.
- Programming an ARM microcontroller in Rust at four different levels of abstraction — Demonstrates how Rust helps to move from low-level embedded code to high-level abstractions.
- The balance between cost, useability and soundness in C bindings, and Rust-SDL2’s release — Writing safe, sound, idiomatic libraries despite the limitations of the borrow checker.
- Math with distances in Rust: safety and correctness across units — How to create a system to cleanly and safely do arithmetic with lengths.
- Lessons learned redesigning and refactoring a Rust Library — ‘RefCell’, the builder pattern and more.
- Iteration patterns for Result & Option — Explores how to filter and partition iterators of Result and Option types idiomatically.
- Idiomatic tree and graph like structures in Rust — Introduction to safe, dynamic, arena based tree structures without using lifetimes.
- Convenient and idiomatic conversions in Rust — Explains ‘From
’, ‘Into ’, ‘TryFrom ’, ‘TryInto ’, ‘AsRef ’ and ‘AsMut ’ with practical examples. - Rustic Bits — Small things that make for rustic code.
- Ripgrep Code Review — An analysis of the popular ‘ripgrep’ tool’s source code.
- Pretty State Machine Patterns in Rust — How to represent a State Machine in an expressive and understandable way in Rust.
- Teaching libraries through good documentation — How to use the full power of Rust’s documentation support (e.g. doc tests).
- Elegant Library APIs in Rust — Many helpful tips and tricks for writing libraries in Rust.
- Russian Dolls and clean Rust code — How to use the full power of ‘Option’ and ‘Result’ (especially ‘and_then()’ and ‘unwrap_or()‘).
- Rayon: data parallelism in Rust — Writing elegant parallel code in Rust.
- Strategies for solving ‘cannot move out of’ borrowing errors in Rust — Practical tips to help understand the borrow-checker and move semantics.
- Effectively Using Iterators In Rust — Explanation of the ‘Iter’ and ‘IntoIter’ traits and how loops actually work in Rust.
- Creating a Rust function that returns a &str or String — How ‘Into’ and ‘Cow’ (Clone-on-write) work together to avoid allocations for string types.
- Creating a Rust function that accepts String or &str — How to make calling your code both ergonomic and fast (zero-allocation).
- Error Handling in Rust — Understanding and handling errors in Rust in an idiomatic way.
- Rust traits for developer friendly libraries — Thoughts about implementing good Rust libraries.
🎤 Talks
Section titled “🎤 Talks”- The Four Horsemen of Bad Rust Code — A talk about common pitfalls in Rust code like overengineering and premature optimization. [Video]
- Tricks of the Trait: Enabling Ergonomic Extractors — Rust Nation UK, Feb. 2023 [Video]
- Ergonomic APIs for hard problems — RustLab Conference, October 2022 [Video]
- Nine Rules for Elegant Rust Library APIs — Seattle Rust Meetup, Sep. 2022 [Video]
- Macros for a More Productive Rust — RustConf 2020 [Video]
- Making Rust Delightful — RustCon Asia 2019 [Video]
- Idiomatic Rust - Writing Concise and Elegant Rust Code — FOSDEM 2018 [Video]
- Idiomatic Rust Libraries — Rustfest Kiev [Video]
💬 Forum
Section titled “💬 Forum”- An idiomatic way to sum up values in a multidimensional Array
- Which is more idiomatic? Functional, imperative or a mix?
📜 History
Section titled “📜 History”Coming from Python, I loved the guidelines on how idiomatic Python looks like. I was inspired by the likes of Peter Norvig, who wrote amazing articles on spellcheckers and sudoku solvers; and, of course, the Zen of Python. For Rust, there is no such thing as the Zen of Python, however, so I started collecting my own resources. The goal of this project is to create a peer-reviewed collection of articles/talks/repos, which teach idiomatic Rust style. It’s a community project and you can contribute.
🔏 License
Section titled “🔏 License”
To the extent possible under law, Matthias Endler has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. Logo adapted from FreePik.com.