🪴 A quantum garden

Rust

2 min read

Rust is a blazingly fast (their claim, not mine) programming language, with safety as one of its main features.

Note

Some of the code here might not be correct, as I wrote it quickly without checking, but it should be sufficiently close to convey the message

Favourite Rust features

Tooling

Coming from a Python background, which has a broken tooling system with several implementations of a package manager, Rust is a breath of fresh air.

  • cargo: Package manager
  • clippy: Linter
  • rustfmt: Formatting
  • rust-analyzer: The main Rust LSP

Type system and match statements

Rust’s type system is extensible, and allows the compiler to check the code’s validity.

Some personal favourites are the Option and Result types, and its incredible enum. In Rust, one can define an enum using the enum keyword

enum ExampleEnum {
    Value1, // Standard enum on other languages
    Value2(String), // Enum with an inner type
    Value3 {inner_value: u32} // Struct like values
}

The enum can be destructured with the match keyword.

let enum_instance = ExampleEnum::Value1;
 
match enum_instance {
   ExampleEnum::Value1 => println!("Value 1"),
   ExampleEnum::Value2(s) => println!(format!("Value 2: {s}")),
   ExampleEnum::Value3 {inner_value} =>println!(format!("Value 3: {inner_value}"))
}

Since Option and Result are also enum, it is common to destructure them

match optional_value {
   None => println!("None"),
   Some(value) => println!(format!({value}))
}

maturin and PyO3

We can now publish Python packages that use Rust using maturin and pyo3. Rust powers some of qiskit and pydantic.

Maturin

The hard truth

Rust is great, but is also hard to learn and use for non-CS folks. Many people in the science community are used to Python, often without type hints.

Sometimes Rust can also become quite verbose, and while the compiler is your friend (most of the time), sometimes one must do non-idiomatic things to make the compiler happy. Some call it Easy Mode Rust.

Rust is a great tool but might not be the ideal tool for all usecases. It is great for production-level, but might be overkill for more explorative efforts (like notebook-style programming, widely used in Data Science and Quantum Computing along others), or when designing/drafting a project.

References

Graph View

Backlinks