Hidden treasures of the Rust ecosystem

The secret life of std

• You can call "text".parse::<T>() on all types T that impl std::str::FromStr for T
• You can .collect() into a Result<T, E> where T: FromIterator
• Formatting syntax (as in format!("{:#?}", vec!["lorem"])) is really powerful (it includes compile-time left pad!), you should read the fmt docs.

Wonders of Rust documentation

• The Little Book of Rust Macros by Daniel Keep
• Rust Design Patterns, a collection by Nick Cameron
• Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists by Alexis Beingessner
• Ticki’s blog with great posts showing the theoretical CS aspects of Rust

The ancient treasures of crates.io

• custom_derive! in all its macro_rules! glory, by Daniel Keep
• quick-error makes creating error enums easy
• conv, a bunch of conversion traits that go beyond what std::convert offers, by Daniel Keep
• difference.rs, a text diffing library with built-in diffing assertion, by Johann Hofmann
• strsim: “Implementations of string similarity metrics. Includes Hamming, Levenshtein, Damerau-Levenshtein, Jaro, and Jaro-Winkler.” By Danny Guo. I can never remember this crate’s name!
• itertools by bluss, because Iterators are awesome.
• The contain-rs GitHub organisation which not only has a funny name but also a bunch of crates for various data structures. (While I have seen this crate, I’m still looking forward to popular, idiomatic, persistent data structures.)
• quickcheck (and everything else) by Andrew Gallant
• typenum, compile-time numbers in Rust, by Paho Lurie-Gregg and Andre Bogus.
• timely dataflow, a low-latency cyclic dataflow computational model. Awesome stuff, like all the other projects by Frank McSherry.

The private life of Rust work in progress

• futures-rs, a WIP implementation of future, promise, and (async) stream types, by Alex Crichton. Now public!
• miri, an interpreter for Rust’s mid-level intermediate representation, by Scott Olson.