It only took me a couple of hours to port one of my old C programs, an utility to produce a hexadecimal and ASCII dump to Rust. The Borrow checker didn't even faze me. All I needed was plenty of Google-fu and my coding skills. JetBrains CLion and git are also very useful tools.
I had a similar experience porting a relatively straightforward and simple CLI utility I had written in C.
Having said that, when I've faced real challenges with Rust (and the borrow checker) it's been with bigger longer running applications, like a webapp, or a long running service.
I have no doubt part of that comes I have a stronger background in garbage collected languages, so my mindset when developing larger applications is in that mode. I'm sure with enough practice I'd get it, but there were many things that I just couldn't replicate one to one in Rust. Not that they weren't possible, but they were just different enough that I couldn't figure it out without being more comfortable in understanding the language, and I just haven't dedicated the time needed to it.
Will likely go back to it at some point, as it is an interesting approach to programming, with lots of upsides.
My biggest issue was trying to print the contents of u8 as a character. In the end this was actually as simple as writing print!("{}", line[i] as char), no print specifiers needed.
I may do another more complicated port soon. I love CLion.
> It only took me a couple of hours to port one of my old C programs, an utility to produce a hexadecimal and ASCII dump to Rust.
Writing C code with Rust is a very different experience than converting C code to idiomatic Rust. There is more to porting than doing 1:1 conversions between keywords.
And by your description your utility basically reads words and prints their value. That doesn't really venture too much beyond the hello world territory.
When you write a program, heap variables are allocated using NEW or Malloc... stack variables are local to a procedure or function, the rest are in the Var block before your code, and are neither on the heap, nor the stack. They're global to the program, or the unit.
In some (interpreted mostly) languages they are. Like some also don't have a stack at all.
But in the most common languages, there is special storages for globals, statics, and constants, which is what the grandparent means (e.g. the DATA section).
