Do you remember the time when one developer broke half of the Internet? Earlier this year a package called left-pad was pulled from the NPM registry (a counterpart of crates.io for the JavaScript folks). This caused... some drama, to say the least. Shall we try this in Rust? Not sure about the drama, maybe just padding a string on the left is enough. There's a crate for that - leftpad!

If you have a background in Python, Java or C++, you're probably used to raising exceptions if something goes wrong. Rust doesn't have exceptions. The official Rust book has a comprehensive chapter on error handling, but the TL;DR is we should probably use the Result type. We can match on its variants to handle both the happy path and error cases in a very explicit, if not verbose, way. To address the verbosity, there was a try! macro that cut down on a lot of pattern matching boilerplate. And as of now we have an even simpler syntax - the ? operator. But when there are many error types, possibly coming from different libraries, making them compose well still requires a lot of code: From and Error implementations and such.

The error_chain crate was created to avoid all that remaining boilerplate. Let's see it in action!

diesel is an in-development ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) for Rust. It aims to be a safe and efficient layer between your business logic and the database. In the words of its authors:

Diesel gets rid of the boilerplate for database interaction and eliminates runtime errors, without sacrificing performance. It takes full advantage of Rust's type system to create a low overhead query builder that "feels like Rust".

The primary author of diesel - Sean Griffin - is also a Ruby on Rails committer and maintainer of Active Record, the ORM used in Rails. So when I saw his name in relation to a Rust ORM, I knew I have to check it out. Sean also gave a great talk at PolyConf 16 about ownership semantics (not only in Rust) - Owning Ownership.

Most of software developers are to some extent familar with Git. This version control system won our hearts even though it is not perfect. Practicality beats purity, as quoted from The Zen of Python.

But Git is not only the git executable. It's the entire ecosystem around Git that made it so successful - IDE integrations, hosting services and third-party tools and libraries. One of these is a very popular C library called libgit2 which implements Git APIs (although git itself doesn't use libgit2 and probably never will). There are bindings to libgit2 in many languages, but we're interested primarily in Rust, right? The git2 crate provides safe Rust bindings.

tera is a pure Rust templating engine. Those familiar with Django, Jinja2 or Twig will feel right at home with tera, as its syntax is very similar. tera is still very young and may not be as feature complete as, say, Jinja2. However it is actively developed and the maintainer is very open to new contributions, so feel free to tackle some issues!