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+Episode: 3426
+Title: HPR3426: Rust 101: Episode 0 - What in Tarnishing?
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3426/hpr3426.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:11:08
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3426 for Mundy, the 20th of September 2021.
+Today's show is entitled, Rust 101, Episode 01 in Tarnishing,
+and is part of the series programming 101 it is hosted by Black Colonel,
+and is about 22 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
+The summary is, Black Colonel teaches you what rust is and how it is different from Python or C.
+This episode of HBR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
+Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
+That's HBR15.
+Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
+Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Black Colonel,
+and this is going to be Episode 01 of my Rust 101 series.
+This is inspired by something that I heard Ken and Dave say on the July
+July Community News episode about having they wish somebody would do a Hello World program type
+thing or an introductory series on Rust, and so that's kind of what I'm going to be trying to do.
+But this isn't really going to have a Rust Hello World program and at least not this episode.
+That's what we're going to be doing next episode.
+In this episode, I just kind of want to go over what Rust is and the reasons why someone
+want to use it over Python or over C. Now I do want to say, first of all, that Rust is the language
+that I use most. I use it when I want to do something that is compiled. I'll get into what that
+means when I compare it to Python, and it's what I use when I want to explain something to someone
+because it is very easy to see what the computer is doing by reading well-formatted Rust code.
+But anyway, let's just start out with what Rust is. Rust is a, what they call a multi-paradime
+programming language, which basically just means it tries to do a lot of things. But the three,
+four-ish things, four or five things that I would say that they really define what Rust is.
+The first one and kind of like the thing that's plastered over a bunch of its
+models and what not is, it's stance on garbage collection. Now, a lot of people in Rust will say
+that Rust doesn't have garbage collection. Now, strictly speaking, that's not entirely true.
+It does not have a lazy garbage collection. It has what it's called resource acquisition
+is initialization type of garbage collection. What that basically means is that things
+memory gets allocated by the computer when a variable comes into scope, and it gets
+deallocated when the variable leaves scope, which is a very efficient way of handling memory.
+A lot of programming languages don't do this. A lot of programming languages just keep everything
+in scope all the way through. You get stuff like globals and stuff with that sort of mentality,
+like global mutables, which are not actually allowed in Rust unless you put unsafe tags
+around it, which I'll get into more later. But essentially, memory is very, very, very,
+very well kept track of in Rust. You will not cause memory leaks unless you know you are causing
+memory leaks, unless you're writing your entire thing in unsafe tags, which I'll get to later,
+and it is not recommended. The next kind of main pillar of Rust is strict typing with type
+inference. Now, this is something that if you're familiar with C, you should know a little bit about
+strict typing, whereas every time you define a variable, you have to put the variable type right
+before what the variable name is. So let int 5 or whatever, like 5fiv equals the number 5.
+Terrible example, since I just mixed my let like, I mean, if you're going to hard code a literal
+into it, you could do worse, but you know, it's not the best example of a thing like, let's say,
+I don't know, let char array penguin equal gen 2 or whatever. That's an example I'm going to be
+using later in Rust, but where you have that char array or that int type, you need to have that
+in C every single time. With Rust, it always has a type, it's still strictly typed, but it can infer
+it from whatever you're supplying as of the value. So for example, if you have, you can write either
+let and then the variable name, so penguin one, and then you can put a colon and then whatever
+the type is. So a, if you're going to do like a literal quoted string, it's going to be of type
+ampersand, Sierra, tango, Romeo, STR, and that equals, let's say, gen 2, and then semicolon.
+What that'll do is it'll create a variable with type ampersand, STR, and set that equal to the
+value of gen 2. But you can also just write let penguin 2 equal quote, gen 2 and quote, and that's it
+without the, the type. And it, because it knows that the type of gen 2 in quotes like that, that
+string value that knows that it has type ampersand, STR, it automatically gives that type to the
+variable that you assign to it. And this is really useful because it's, it keeps the, it keeps you
+from making errors where you start mixing your types around, like can happen in C++ and Python
+and, and stuff. But it also prevents, but it also allows you to write less code because you don't
+have to always be writing the what type it is as long as you can keep track of it. You can write
+it, which will help, might help you sort of visually see what type things are supposed to be.
+And it also helps you in troubleshooting because you can just like if something's not working
+because it's saying that there's some kind of Mitch match type, you can explicitly cast a variable
+as that type that you want it to be and see what the compiler says is the problem. And then you'll
+know how to modify what you're doing in order to make it the type that you want. And a lot of times
+will actually tell you in the compiler ways that you can fix that problem with typing. So that makes
+the compiler happy, it makes computer happy and it makes you happy because it makes you have to do
+less work when actually troubleshooting. I'm going to put examples of the code in the show notes
+by the way for some of the things that I'm talking about. The next one that I'm talking about is
+reference pointers, which going back to the way that memory works where it comes in and out of
+scope. There is kind of a problem where if you have a function and you take a variable into that
+function, then that variable is going to be taken into the scope of that function. So when that
+function ends, then that variable should be deallocated and destroyed. But if you use it later in
+the main function, then the compiler is no video what to do because it doesn't have the the actual
+value there. But the thing gets around that is with that ampersand operator on the type, which
+borrows that value to a subroutine or to a function and then destroys the reference without
+the actual value. This is basically like the way that pointers work a lot of times in C,
+but it's a lot more elegant in the way that it's formulated and you're not actually having to
+declare an actual raw pointer value in order to do this. You can also dereference something that
+you want to be owned using the asterisk symbol, which is the the star symbol, which is the way that
+you would declare a pointer traditionally in C. So the the fourth sort of pillar of rust is the
+idea of being immutable by default. So when you declare a variable like let's say let minum equal
+two, then it's going to automatically, you know, do the type inference of, you know, whatever the
+heck this needs to be is the type that it's going to be. And let's say you want to add one to that
+now you can do minum equals minum plus one, but that won't actually work because you didn't
+declare that minum was going to be changed. So when you actually set up the variable, the way
+you would do that correctly is that you would put let mute MUT mic uniform tango minum equal two,
+and then you can do minum equals minum plus one, then you can print it out and it will give you the
+value it will give you three out in that case. And the reason that it does that is because if you
+keep things from being changed at runtime, then you can guarantee the awareness of what the memory
+is. So it keeps track of that this thing isn't doesn't need to be changed, which is going to limit
+the errors that you can encounter in your actual binary after it's compiled because a lot of times
+what can happen is that if somebody can figure out how to modify or how to make the program modify
+some variable that you set that can cause a lot of bugs or even exploits, whereas if it's something
+that doesn't need to be modified ever, then you can just not have it be modified ever. Just
+takes the value it has when it was instantiated. And the last thing that I want to talk about as far
+as like the pillars of Rust is this idea of unsafe mode. A lot of these things you really have to
+work around. If you want to write like really low-level code or if there's something that you
+know what you want to do like with the actual like low-level part of the computer, like if you want
+to modify individual memory addresses or use raw pointers to point to specific memory addresses
+or what have you. A lot of the defaults for Rust don't let you do that because it's not safe to
+do in a regular program. But all you have to do is put it in essentially do unsafe and then a
+curly brace and then whatever code you want it to be unsafe and then end that curly brace and
+then only that part of the code will be run in what's called unsafe mode, which essentially means
+you can do whatever the heck you want to do. And it assumes that if you're running that code like
+that that you know what you're doing and any bugs that you introduce you can find essentially.
+So it allows you to do whatever you want to do. You just need to make sure that you let it know
+hey I know what I'm doing. I can do this. And my example for that is what you can actually do is
+you can just write in C or you can import functions from C code directly into your Rust program using
+extern command so you can do extern quote the capital letter C and quote and then curly brace
+and then you can put a function declaration in the way that you would in Rust. But with the actual
+value without the actual name of the function in C. So I'm using the print f example from C.
+So print f takes a value that's a I mean technically it's a character array because that's what
+strings are in C. But I'm using the ampersand STR type which does throw a warning on the compiler
+but it can handle it. So it's mostly fine. I just don't I haven't I didn't figure out how to
+actually do a character array as a rust type per say. I mean I guess I could have actually just done
+whatever not the point like I actually thought of how to do it just now but it's not super important
+and also I would need to give it a defined size. So I'm not going to worry about it at the moment.
+The point is is that you can have this kind of like print f is a C function and you're giving it an
+input from a rust type and then you could do a semicolon to end that line and then end the curly
+brace and you have that extern block that extern C curly brace function declaration and curly
+brace. And then in your main function you can put unsafe tags and put just unsafe open curly
+brace print f hello world and parentheses semicolon and then end curly brace. And this is actually
+rust syntax but you're using the function from C. So rust takes the value you gave it for the
+argument. So hello world puts that into the C function of print f and runs that in unsafe mode
+and just does whatever that function says to do and then it works. So this is actually a way of
+writing a hello world program in C in rust which is really cool to me because it means that even
+if you're familiar with here if you have colleagues that you see you can still use rust and just import
+those functions into your program. Now I kind of want to talk about why I would use C or rather
+why I would use rust over Python and actually a lot of the reasons why I would use rust over Python
+is a lot of the same reasons why I would use it a why I would use C over Python which is that it
+makes it faster because it's compiled as well as other things that kind of help with it being
+compiled is that it you can get help from the compiler. So if you make an error in Python nine
+times out of 10 it just doesn't even tell you what it is because it just eats that error and gives
+you weird output and you have to do a bunch of print statements in order to figure out what the heck
+happened and et cetera and it's just not a lot of fun. Whereas in rust when you make a mistake
+it will tell you exactly what your mistake is exactly where your mistake is and suggest some
+options on how you might fix that mistake sometimes. It also creates a smaller binary executable size
+and this is important in a lot of situations where you want to keep things portable like if you
+want to put this program on a flash drive for example if you want to put on an SD card or something
+of that nature. For example I run rust programs on my phone and it's useful because then I can
+compile them or cross compile them on my computer importing the rust binary that's only like a few
+kilobytes or megabytes and then run it on my phone and I don't need to take up all of the the whole
+code base worth of well the whole code base and then the whole runtime layer as well I don't need
+to take up all of that memory on my phone which is really nice. It also creates a higher throughput
+which means that because it's faster and it's a smaller size you can push more data through it
+and sort of it and it will just handle it basically. It's also more logically consistent so one of
+the things that I have a problem with in Python is that because nothing it has static type you can
+just get really confused and really down in the weeds of what the hell is going on in your code.
+It's one of the my sort of guiding principles when it comes to good programming languages is that
+it shouldn't abstract away the machine like you should be able to follow what is happening in your
+code very easily because your computer is pretty stupid your computer doesn't like your computer
+can't make implications about like philosophy or whatever at least not yet so it shouldn't you
+shouldn't require those kind of implications to read your code and so those are a lot of the reasons
+why I would use it over Python why would you use it over C is because well first of all it's
+safe by default so in C there's a lot of problems where you can run into with memory leakage which
+I know if you write good C you're not going to worry about it and you can implement a lot of the
+same best practices that rust uses by default you can implement those in C it just requires a lot
+more writing of C like there's a lot it's a lot more verbose try and see which gives me to my
+next point which is that it's a lot easier to read rust than it is to read C because a lot of the
+syntactic sugar and the syntax that's in rust just makes more visual sense at least to me I mean
+I think I think it's kind of makes more visual sense in general because it kind of follows a lot
+of the same visual cues as it were as I mean I would say as Python but with Python a lot of that
+actually has semantic value whereas in rust it just looks that way and you can actually rewrite it
+in a different way that's in a lot of different ways like you can with C code where you can write
+things as one liners with a semicoloned elimination and all that but you can also but because of the
+way that the syntax of it is even when you do that the actual progression of the way that the code
+is makes a lot more sense than in C because you have to deal with less pointers you have to deal with
+less weird data types because C is limited with a fact that it's translating it directly into a phrase
+of assembly and because it's translating it into a phrase of assembly assembly it doesn't have stuff
+string this per se it uses a raise of characters it uses a raise of bytes which are translated into
+ASCII characters when you push them to standard output but rust just lets you write things as strings
+and then it handles all of that in the compiler all of that like computer egeargany stuff and I
+like that it lets me do that because I can write it as a human but still understand it as a computer
+because yes it says ampersand str but one of that thing things that that means is that it's a
+str it's a string of characters so it's a string of these data bytes or whatever it is like
+of letters and the ampersand actually tells me that it's actually referencing it from a place in
+memory where it has this literal stored which does actually improve a lot of the ways that you can
+deal with sort of your understanding of the computer aspect of now a lot of people would say that
+this is a lot of these things have been solved in C++ but C++ is really dumb it's a really dumb
+language and it introduces a lot of errors and a lot of memory leaks into C like it it is meant to
+be more human friendly at the expense of being computer friendly that's sort of what it sort
+it boils down to and that's why I don't use C++ I use C but I don't use C++ ever it's just
+I've tried to do it and it's it is human friendly but when you're trying to debug or if you're
+trying to actually understand what your computer is doing with the information is not at all pleasant
+to do that you also can get arrays and vectors and all of that in Rust which by default aren't
+there in C you would have to import libraries that in C or you would have to write it yourself a
+lot of times but like the best thing about Rust in my opinion the thing that I reason why I use
+it over C so much is because it has these two types called option and result and what those do
+is that with option if you have a value you want to be optional you can say that it's type is
+option then you can have a less than symbol and then whatever type you wanted to have normally
+and then comma and then none and then a greater than symbol the left and right sort of triangle
+braces what that'll do is that it will try to like if the result of whatever you're doing is like
+if it can have the type that you want it to have then it will return a container called sum
+and then whatever the actual value is of the type that you want it to be and then if it can't
+do that if it's unable to assign it that type then it returns the type none which lets you know
+that it wasn't able to do that and this makes it really easy because it's like Booleans but with
+structure and that result is a sort of the same way for functions because what results will give
+you is that you can get give it a certain type if it succeeds like if it would return true as it
+were or return exit status is zero or you can have a return a different type if it fails so you can
+have a return a different string or a different like exit code or even of something of type error which
+might have more information about how the error occurred within it and so you can use these as a
+really really elegant way of doing error correction and error catching in your code and it's so nice
+to be able to use that because it's writing a lot of that stuff from scratch and see or Python
+was one of the things that gave me a headache the most and so this just takes care of it all for you
+and it's all very well integrated and very well built in I will say that one of the things that
+kind of annoys me is that because everything is statically typed you can get into situations where
+you get verbose where you're doing a bunch of typecasting from one type to another which can be
+annoying but it's nowhere to see it's way better than see actually and it's it's compiled so you
+don't have to deal with a lot of the slowness or a lot of the weirdness of Python or my preferred
+scripting language is lua and I would use it over lua when I would want something to be just faster
+or smaller or compiled so it's a little bit more portable so you're the person you're sending it to
+doesn't need to have lua installed or it doesn't need to have that particular framework installed
+because you're just sending them a binary and maybe they need to have the libraries installed
+but a lot of times at least when you're running Linux you can have a lot of those dependencies
+taking care for you you can use can you auto tools in order to have them in port all of that at
+compile time you can package it in with whatever packaging solution you want and it will just work
+you can do a lot of that with lua as well where you include the runtime in the binary but that's
+just a lot larger of a file and a lot more of it to do than just including header files and stuff
+like that I didn't even get into the way that modules into all of that work which is so much
+better than seeing Python and oh my gosh the directory structure and Python can go die but
+that those are kind of the basic points of the reasons why I like Rust and why Rust is I'm
+really excited for Rust to be added into the kernel I'm kind of rambling at this point but
+I'm I'm really excited for a lot of that stuff because Rust is a very good programming language
+and I think everybody should at least know about it but I think everyone should really learn it
+because it is just see but better it's what C++ wishes it was thank you for listening to all this
+if you want to contact me I will put my contact information in the show notes and I'll talk to you
+guys next time where I'll be writing a hello world program in explaining the way that hello world
+programs as well as macros and probably that's about it honestly because the hello world program
+in Rust is super simple I'll explain a little bit about cargo as well so explain cargo macros
+and the hello world program next time on Rust 101 thank you talk to you next time
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