Daily Learnings: Tue, Jun 13, 2023
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle. — Amy Bloom
Rust: Advanced Data Types
I’m currently following a 14hr YouTube course from freeCodeCamp on the Rust programming language. Rust is a much lower-level language compared to the languages that I’m most familiar with, like Python, Javascript, and even Java; it’s more akin to C++ or even C. It’s become incredibly popular, considered one of the most potentially performant languages available, and it’s something that I’ve been itching to learn better. However, I’ve had some hesitancy in putting time into learning it, as it seems like the learning curve might be steep, and that it’s lower-level than what I’m cut out for. That said, when I saw that freeCodeCamp released a course on it, I knew that it was time to start learning.
In the beginning hours of the course, Rust’s data types are covered. In most of the other languages that I work in regularly, available data types are simple, and sometimes even obfuscated a bit. This is not the case in Rust, you get a LOT of potential data types to work with, and they’re very explicit. It’s been really fun to learn a bit more and dive into some more advanced computer science-based topics that I don’t review usually.
Specifically, I learned yesterday and today a bit about the integer-based types in Rust: signed and unsigned integers of various lengths, and I want to jot some notes down about them:
- Signed integers mean that the value can be either positive or negative
- The variable can store the “sign” (positive sign or negative sign)
- Unsigned integers are always positive (their lower-bound is always 0)
- Given that signed integers store the “sign”, they can only hold ~ half of the total potential upper and lower bounds of their unsigned counterparts
- I learned a bit about the “Two’s complement” principle, in how computers actually store this sign in signed integers, but admittedly a lot of it went over my head…