Introduction

Hello, world!

Before you dive in, let me explain why Ultimate Rust was built and what it means.

Who Am I

My name is Richard Alves. I'm one of those developers who wants to make code as optimized as possible. Solve things in the most performant way possible, the most secure way possible. I'd rather take longer to build something while already thinking about its future scalability than build fast just to say I did it.

I know that's not exactly a virtue, but it's what led me to discover Rust.

The Discovery

I remember searching something like "best language for x thing" and hearing about Go and Rust. I chose to try Go first. After having contact with more "laid-back" languages like PHP, C, Python, and JavaScript, I thought it was incredible! I fell in love right away! What do you mean a language that won't even compile if I declare a variable but don't use it? It seemed like the perfect language for someone as perfectionist as me.

Until I tried Rust too. The code seemed much harder, but everywhere it said it was more performant. It was the cheese luring someone like me in. It was obvious it was only a matter of time before I tried it.

I fell in love right away too, and on a much deeper level. From that moment on, I became a Rust fanatic. There are people who are passionate about places, there are people who are passionate about other people, but me... I fell in love with Rust.

Rust: The Perfect Language?

Over time, I started to realize that Rust wasn't just a faster, safer, or stricter language. It was a completely new way of thinking when writing code. A way of writing code that doesn't let you cheat, doesn't let you close your eyes to errors details that, sooner or later, would blow up in your face in any other language.

Suddenly, I wasn't just "writing code that works" anymore. I was writing code that couldn't silently break, that gave me guarantees I didn't even know I needed. None of that "it's working and I don't even know how" or worse, "it's NOT working and I don't even know how."

The feeling of compiling something in Rust is like turning in an assignment that went through an army of teachers: nothing flimsy, nothing improvised, nothing "I'll fix it later" gets out of there.

And that changes you.

You start to see every variable as something alive. Every reference as a promise. Every borrow checker error as a teacher saying: "Hey, you can do better. You know you can do better."

It's strange to say this, but Rust taught me discipline.

It taught me to treat memory with respect. It taught me that performance isn't a detail, it's a responsibility. And, most importantly, it taught me that writing a program is much more than stringing lines of code together. It's building something that another person will read, understand, trust, and expand.

And the more I learned, the more I realized an uncomfortable truth: if I could rewrite everything I've done in the past in Rust, I would. Not out of vanity, but because Rust awakens a standard of excellence, makes the product that other people will use better.

Rust isn't just a language. It's a commitment.

The Difficult Journey

But my passion for Rust didn't make learning it easy. Quite the opposite.

When I decided to dive headfirst into Rust, I ran into many frustrating obstacles.

• The first was that materials in Portuguese were scarce, and the ones that existed were, for the most part, extremely low quality, too superficial, or simply bad machine translations that confused more than they taught.

• So I turned to content in English. And there came the second problem: practically every resource on Rust, even the official Rust Book itself, assumed I already had solid programming experience. They required me to know intermediate or advanced concepts before even starting to learn Rust at all. They recommended Rust as a "second language."

Although I had already had some contact with programming, I had never developed a project with enough complexity to feel like I fit those requirements. I was stuck between being "too much of a beginner" for the existing resources and "too experienced" to give up.

I had to use several resources simultaneously: the Rust Book itself (which I recommend to everyone), Udemy courses, YouTube videos, and AIs to explain things and make them more approachable for someone without complete experience. It was a fragmented, exhausting, and often confusing process.