Welcome to my first blog post on A Pythonista Learning Rust where I'll share my journey of learning Rust as a Python developer.

Why Rust?

I've been a Python developer for a while now, and I love the language. However, I've been hearing a lot about Rust lately and wanted to explore it further. Rust is known for its performance, safety, and concurrency support, things I have not learned much about so far and are fascinating.

Popular projects in the Python space that leverage Rust include Pydantic and Ruff. We recently had Samuel Colvin (creator of Pydantic) on our Pybites podcast and at Pycon 2024 I saw Charlie Marsh talk about how Rust makes Ruff so fast. This inspired me to dive into Rust.

Learning Rust

As per our Pybites motto you have to build projects and share your learning to get the most benefit, hence this blog.

Of course I will heavily use AI tools, most notably Co-Pilot and ChatGPT to help me learn and write Rust code. I will also share how this process goes ...

And lastly shout-out to Jim Hodapp who has a community called Rust Never Sleeps. When learning new skills it's important to join a community and his is very welcoming and helpful. For Python I recommend you join us on Circle.

Tools for this blog

To keep it Rust I use Zola to generate this blog. It's a static site generator written in Rust. The nice dark theme you're seeing here is Terminimal which goes well with my love for the terminal.

I will do another post how I set this up with GitHub Actions to deploy it to GitHub Pages.

I am looking forward to learning a lot of Rust and see how I can speed up some Python with it.

Even if I keep doing most of my coding in Python, I expect that learning Rust will make me a better programmer.