Important note: this article is outdated!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.

The itertools crate contains several utility functions and macros inspired by Haskell and Python itertools. As you can guess from the name, these have to do with iteration and iterators. Rust has recently split the Iterator trait into Iterator and IteratorExt for so called object safety reasons (see the RFC for an explanation). This is mostly irrelevant for today's episode of 24 days of Rust, but worth keeping in mind.

Important note: this article is outdated!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.

The state of HTTP libraries in Rust is a constant flux. See Are we web yet? for an overview of the current affairs. There's rust-http which although usable (for example Nickel builds on top of that) is not developed anymore. Teepee, it's conceptual successor, is in the words of it's author not even vaguely usable. Meanwhile a new library emerged during the last few months: hyper, which will be the subject of this blogpost.

Important note: this article is outdated!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.

Important note: this article is outdated!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.