Data WithRust: Update #2

Let me start by saying that the past month has been very eventful to the point that I almost decided to abandon the project. There have been some developments around the trademarks for the Rust language that could have made projects like these unsustainable.

While that is being worked on by the Rust foundation and the community, I've decided to just proceed. The worst that could happen is renaming the project but that isn't an issue.

The newsletter currently passed the +800 subscribers mark, without doing much marketing or discussing about it in April. I can't express how this is motivating and I'm very happy to be able to make a little mark in the world and contribute this little guide.

A fun development that happened though, is that Elon Musk believes that Rust will be the language in which AGI is going to be developed with. Interesting, right?

Either way, let's get to the updates. As usual, the changelog is available over here.

✅ Chapter 2: done

I'm happy to say that the second chapter is done and has all the information I think is necessary to get started with Rust as well as understand it's advantages in action compared to Python.

The chapter covers:

• Configuring your IDE
• Compiling your first Rust program by hand using rustc (Rust compiler)
• Understanding what Cargo is and why it's useful
• Basic Rust syntax: very light touch
• The different data types in Rust
• Functions, modules & errors
• Some words & video links to Rust specific features

As a bonus, I've also added in a Rust for data in 15 minutes guide. This one is meant to be a constantly updated and can be considered an executive summary to present the benefits of Rust for data work.

👀 What's next?

Quite a few things are planned ahead

I'm preparing a few very light videos to get some core Rust concepts across and how they can be useful compared to Python. These will be relatively short and I'll A/B test them on multiple platforms. If I believe it's good (and not cringe at hearing my voice in a video recording), I'll share them with the newsletter exclusively first. 😎

Now that the basics are out of the way, we can get into the interesting parts of Rust. I'll rework much of the next chapters to cover things like:

• Testing Rust code
• parsing CSV files
• Serialising Parquet/Avro data
• working with API's, JSON data
• deploying these workloads (integration into current pipelines and how to)

and a lot more.

Thank you so much for the trust and see you in 2 to 3 weeks for the next update 🤗

Karim

🐈