Intro

Not long ago I posed a challenge for those of us learning rust: https://lemmy.ml/post/12478167.

Basically write an equivalent of git diff --no-index A B … a file differ.

While it’s never too late to attempt it, I figured it’d be a good time to check in to see what anyone thought of it, in part because some people may have forgotten about it and would still like to have a shot, and also because I had a shot and am happy with what I wrote.

Check In

I’ll post where I got up to below (probably as a comment), but before that, does anyone have anything to share on where they got up to … any general thoughts on the challenge and the general idea of these?

My experience

My personal experience was that I’d not kept up with my rust “studies” for a bit and used this as a good “warm up” or “restart” exercise and it worked really well. Obviously learning through doing is a good idea, and the Rust Book is a bit too light, IMO, on good exercises or similar activities. But I found this challenge just difficult enough to make me feel more comfortable with the language.

Future Challenges

Any ideas for future challenges??

My quick thoughts

  • A simple web app like a todo app using axtix_web and diesel and some templating crate.
  • Extend my diffing program to output JSON/HTML and then to diff by characters in a string
  • A markdown parser??
  • JayjaderMEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    A markdown parser??

    This is a great challenge to get into writing parsers, and/or try out the excellent nom crate.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Thanks! I was just gonna “state machine” it but nom looks like fun too! Hadn’t seen a parsing library/apprach like that before (“combinator”?)

      • JayjaderMEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        If I’m not mistaken, it’s how they teach parsing in schools. But even then, they have you figure out the exact combinators that you need first, on paper, and then implement them more-or-less entirely by hand. So you wouldn’t encounter a combinator library such as this one.

        I’m aware of few combinator libraries, mostly because they really require functions-as-first-class-citizens to be intended by whatever language you’re using in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if languages like haskel, ocaml, and fsharp have many.