24 days of Rust - docopt

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

One of the few chores when building a commandline program is argument parsing, so that myprogram --config=myfile.conf --verbose -o output.txt makes sense. Some arguments come in short and long variants, some are optional and some are positional only. There are a lot of libraries for argument parsing, some are even included in the respective languages' distributions. In Rust's case there's the getopts crate.

The first thing a moderately savvy user will do is... no, not read the documentation, but run myprogram -h (or --help) to discover available options. getopts and other libraries can derive such help summary for you, saving your time and reducing duplication. But what if it was the other way round? You'd write the usage message, listing possible options, and the tool would build an argument parser from that. Enter docopt.

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Written on Dec. 4, 2014

24 days of Rust - csv

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

Most of us programmers have encountered the CSV format at some point of our career. Whether you cooperate with financial people, analyze some scientific data or simply allow the users of your web app to download a record of their activities, chances are you'll use some variation of CSV as the data format. Note that I said some variation - CSV itself isn't standardized and there are lots of quirks in different implementations.

CSV libraries exist for lots of languages, making it a common format for interoperability (alongside XML or JSON) and sometimes preferred for data of a tabular nature. In the Rust ecosystem there is the csv crate which will be the focus of this blog post.

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Written on Dec. 3, 2014

24 days of Rust - slow_primes

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

When I start learning a new programming language, I like to code at least several solutions to Project Euler problems. These are very math-oriented and may not be the best introduction to general purpose programming, but it's a start. Anyway, it's just fun to solve them! (...and way more fun to solve them in a fast way and not by brute force.)

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Written on Dec. 2, 2014

24 days of Rust - Cargo and crates.io

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

Inspired by Ollie Charles and his excellent 24 days of Hackage series, I'm going to try and introduce you to a number of Rust language features, useful libraries and cool projects built with Rust. In fact this is a learning opportunity for me too - as much as I love Rust, I'm just diving in. If you think I'm wrong or know an interesting library you want me to write about, feel free to comment!

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Written on Dec. 1, 2014