Rust Practice

Master ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, and zero-cost abstractions.

Language Essentials

Concept	Details
Memory Model	Ownership + borrowing, no GC, compile-time lifetime checks
Type System	Strong static, algebraic types (enum), traits, generics, no null
Error Handling	Result<T, E>, Option<T>, ? operator, no exceptions
Concurrency	Fearless concurrency, Send/Sync traits, async/await, Tokio
Build	cargo, crates.io, edition system (2021+)
Standard	Stable Rust, edition 2021

Key Idioms

• Pattern matching exhaustively on enums
• Iterator chains over explicit loops (map, filter, collect)
• impl Trait for return-position polymorphism
• Newtype pattern for type safety (struct Miles(f64))
• Builder pattern for complex construction
• From/Into conversions instead of explicit casts
• derive macros for common trait implementations

Reference Documentation

• The Rust Programming Language — free, the official book
• Rust by Example — free, learn by doing
• std library docs — API reference
• Rustonomicon — unsafe Rust deep dive
• Programming Rust (Blandy, Orendorff, Tindall) — comprehensive reference

Practising these

practice/bin/ol list  build rust          # which of these have references yet
practice/bin/ol start build rust 01       # clone it stubbed into .scratchpad/
practice/bin/ol check build rust 01       # run it; exit code is the verdict
practice/bin/ol diff  build rust 01       # your attempt against the reference

Exercises are ordered by concept, not by difficulty, so pick by the stars rather than by the number. An exercise listed below with no reference yet is a row in this table and nothing more; see the practice path for how the harness works.

Exercises

#	Exercise	Concepts	Difficulty
01	Vec<T> from scratch	Unsafe, RawVec, Drop, Deref; recommended before course module L10.1	⭐⭐⭐
02	Doubly-linked list	Rc<RefCell<T>> or unsafe, borrow checker challenges; course version: ds.07	⭐⭐⭐⭐
03	Hash map (Robin Hood)	Hashing, Entry API, generics with trait bounds; course version: ds.05	⭐⭐⭐⭐
04	Channel (mpsc clone)	Arc<Mutex<T>>, Condvar, Send bounds; course version: lang.09	⭐⭐⭐⭐
05	Iterator adaptor library	Iterator trait, associated types, lazy evaluation; course version: L1.5	⭐⭐⭐
06	CLI argument parser	Lifetimes, &str vs String, builder pattern	⭐⭐
07	Async TCP echo server	async/await, tokio, Pin, Future; course version: lang.09, L10.5	⭐⭐⭐⭐
08	ECS (Entity Component System)	Trait objects vs enums, Any, downcast, arena allocation	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
09	Proc macro for derive(Builder)	Procedural macros, syn, quote, token streams	⭐⭐⭐⭐
10	Lock-free stack	AtomicPtr, compare_exchange, ABA problem	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐