Teaching Rust

Firstly, we've lately been thinking about how to introduce Rust to experienced programmers and these are the topics, in roughly this order, that we believe are critical to teach:

• Stack vs. heap, values, copying
• Ownership (front and center)
• Borrowing
• Copying vs. Moving (and the notion of Pods for copying)
• References vs. values, and their relationship to ownership and stack/heap allocation
• Lifetimes (specifically taught in terms of returning borrowed fields of a struct)

It's impossible to understand Rust without grasping these concepts, and the earlier and more frequently they are taught the better.

Then there are a number of practical subjects that all Rust programmers need to know to write real code:

• Vectors vs. Slices
• Structs, enums, and pattern matching
• Also covered in passing, with links to guides for further info: fns, impls, basic types, using libraries, Option, generics

For an example of how to teach Rust I recommend watching Niko's recent talk

Rust relating to other languages

One good resource is Rust for C++ programmers.

I consider Rust to be a multi-paradigm systems language, not specifically functional, not specifically OO, but drawing influence from both. The biggest influences are probably C++ and ML. It's design is influenced by existing languages, but more importantly by practical experience solving problems of memory safety, performance, and concurrency in large-scale software (Servo). To that end it deviates from precedent established in other mainstream programming languages, introducing the key concepts of ownership and borrowing.