►Building Extensible Systems
▼Homework
►Reflective Essay
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Rust evaluation
6.2.0.2
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Reflective Essay

Deadline Monday 20 April, beginning of class.

Draft The draft of the memo is due on Friday April 17 NOON on Ms. Biron’s desk.

Rust evaluation

Your final task is to write a reflective memo on the Rust language. Start your memo with a one-paragraph (neutral) description of your understanding of Rust. The primary purpose of the essay is to evaluate how comfortable you became with Rust and how well you think you understand the philosophy behind the language design. Here are some questions that may help you with this task:

  • What aspect of Rust took the longest to understand?

  • Is Rust’s type system helpful in thinking about resources? Or did interjections during the code walks surprise you?

  • Is Rust’s type system helpful in thinking about concurrency?

  • What was most annoying about Rust once you knew your way around?

  • The Rust developers are also wondering whether you interacted with the broader Rust community (announcements, blogs, irc, mailing lists, other web sites). Please respond to this question with your last sentence.

Do not just write up answers to these questions. Use them to think about all aspects of your Rust experience.

Many of you have worked with languages that have a sophisticated eco-system (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and so on). Please try ignore this aspect of your experience.

Format Your memo must fit on a letter-size page with 1.5in marginsThis is a government requirement. all around. Use an 11-point non-slanted font; you may use slanted or italicized letters for emphasis and a mono-sized font for code examples. If you need a large code sample to illustrate your annoyances, place it on the back side of the page all by itself.

Address your memo to the Rust developers at Mozilla.

Notes (1) We intend to share anonymized memos with the Rust developers. If you do not wish that we share yours, leave a bold-faced note to this effect in the header of the memo.

(2) If you would like to share additional insights with the actual Rust developers or us, please feel free to write an appendix of arbitrary length. Jesse and I will read it but not grade it.

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