Skip Navigation
Rust @programming.dev tebro @lemmy.tebro.fi

Getting into rust and could use some pointers

Greetings to all.

I have spent the last couple of evenings learning about Rust and trying it out. Wrote a simple cli calculator as a first thing and thought I would improve it by making it available over http.

I was actually a bit surprised to find that there was no http tooling in the standard library, and searching online gave me an overload of information on different libraries and frameworks.

I ended up implementing my own simple HTTP server, might as well as this is a learning project.

Now I have it working, and while it isn't perfect or done, I thought that this would be a good time to check what things I am doing wrong/badly.

Which is why I am here, would love to get some pointers on it all to make sure I am going in the right direction in the future.

The project is hosted here: https://github.com/Tebro/rsimple_http

15

You're viewing a single thread.

15 comments

  • My quick notes which are tailored to beginners:

    Use Option::ok_or_else() and Result::map_err() instead of let .. else.

    • let .. else didn't always exist. And you might find that some old timers are slightly triggered by it.
    • Functional style is generally preferred, as long as it doesn't effectively become a code obfuscater, like over-using Options as iterators (yes Options are iterators).
    • Familiarize yourself with the ? operator and the Try trait

    Type inference and generic params

    let headers: HashMap = header_pairs
        .iter()
        .map(|line| line.split_once(":").unwrap())
        .map(|(k, v)| (k.trim().to_string(), v.trim().to_string()))
        .collect();

    (Borken sanitization will probably butcher this code, good thing the problem will be gone in Lemmy 0.19)

    Three tips here:

    1. You don't need to annotate the type here because it can be inferred since headers will be returned as a struct field, the type of which is already known.
    2. In this pattern, you should know that you can provide the collected type as a generic param to collect() itself. That may prove useful in other scenarios.
    3. You should know that you can collect to a Result/Option if the iterator items are Results/Options. So that .unwrap() is not an ergonomic necessity 😉

    Minor point

    • Use .into() or .to_owned() for &str => String conversions.
      • Again, some pre-specialization old timers may get slightly triggered by it.

    make good use of the crate echo system

    • It's important to make good use of the crate echo system, and talking to people is important in doing that correctly and efficiently.
      • This post is a good start.
      • More specifically, the http crate is the compatibility layer used HTTP rust implementations. Check it out and maybe incorporate it into your experimental/educational code.

    Alright, I will stop myself here.

    • Thanks! Really good points here, will have to find some time to apply them.

15 comments