<h1>Why Rust Might Attract More Developers Than Java and JavaScript</h1>
Rust is un­de­ni­ably a greatly ap­pre­ci­ated lan­guage, af­ter all, it has placed as “#1 Most Loved Programming Language” on the StackOverﬂow Developer Survey for 6th year run­ning.
Reading this, you are prob­a­bly very aware of why so many peo­ple like it, but I will be go­ing over those rea­sons any­way, at least be­fore I re­veal its se­cret weapon.
It’s fast, very fast. While it may not be a great bench­mark, The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, mea­sures that it falls just a hair be­hind the fastest lan­guage, C.
That makes sense, given that Rust was meant to re­place C/C++. Even bet­ter than the bench­mark, it has been shown that in many sit­u­a­tions, the Rust com­piler is able to op­ti­mize code sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter than C or C++, just be­cause it has more in­for­ma­tion about the de­vel­op­ers in­tent.
It’s con­sis­tent. For more than pretty much any other lan­guage, Rust de­vel­op­ers can ex­pect that, if their code com­piles, it works. When it does­n’t com­pile, the com­piler gives bet­ter feed­back and ad­vice than any other lan­guage. It can even check if your arith­metic is wrong.
It’s com­pli­cated, but only where it needs to be. The lan­guage it­self, as well as its stan­dard li­brary are built very con­sciously, by its users. Most places where you might ﬁnd you have to write te­dious boil­er­plate, Rust makes it easy. It also gives you the free­dom to write code that does ex­actly what you want, ex­actly how you want. We will get back to this later.
<h2>The Problem</h2>
When start­ing a new pro­ject what is the ﬁrst thing you are go­ing to do? It de­pends on what stack you are us­ing.
If you want to use NodeJS, it might look some­thing like:
<pre><code class="hljs language-bash">mkdir new_project
touch index.js
npm install
</code></pre>
That is just the bare min­i­mum. If you want to add any de­pen­den­cies, you have to go through an un­rea­son­able num­ber of hoops, and the stan­dard pack­age repos­i­tory, npm, is known for be­ing quite in­se­cure, not to men­tion it be­ing con­trolled by a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion.
If you want to use Java, you have to use some kind of tem­plate, oth­er­wise it’s im­pos­si­ble to cre­ate a pro­ject from scratch. Even then, you have to de­cide be­tween two or three pack­age man­agers, and deal with it when li­braries don’t sup­port your choice.
If you want to use C or C++ for­get it. As a be­gin­ner, you are go­ing to be stuck ﬁg­ur­ing out how to use the lo­cal linker and com­piler to get any li­brary to work.
<h2>The Rusty Solution</h2>
Cargo is one of the sim­plest, eas­i­est to use build tools out there. It does every­thing you might need, and it may be why Rust may soon be­come a ma­jor player. 99% of the time, you can just copy and paste a given li­brary’s string di­rectly from <a href="https://crates.io">crates.io</a>, which is a repos­i­tory owned and op­er­ated by the Rust Foundation, and you are off to the races.
Testing is easy too, just run <code>cargo test</code>, and you’re done. It cov­ers both unit tests, and in­te­gra­tion tests if you need it.
`cargo doc`` pro­vides a con­sis­tent, and easy way to doc­u­ment code. It’s also great for users, al­low­ing de­vel­op­ers ac­cess to a straight­for­ward rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what a li­brary looks like.
It’s ex­ten­si­ble, some of the great­est bi­nary crates out there ex­ist to ex­tend the func­tion­al­ity. So, in the few ar­eas where <code>cargo</code> on its own does­n’t cut it, there are ad­di­tional crates to ﬁll the gaps.
<h2>Closing</h2>
At least for the mo­ment, of all the great rea­sons to use Rust, <code>cargo</code> will be the most sig­nif­i­cant rea­son it will in­crease in pop­u­lar­ity.
<img src="/images/most_loved_stackoverflow_2021.png" alt="Most loved programming languages, according to the 2021 StackOverflow Developer Survey">
Rust can be tough to learn, es­pe­cially for peo­ple who are used to dy­namic lan­guages like JavaScript. But what Rust has beat for most lan­guages is the build sys­tem. <code>cargo</code> alone makes Rust more ap­proach­able than C/C++, Java and many oth­ers.
More and more new de­vel­op­ers will be go­ing to Rust in­stead of those other lan­guages, be­cause it is eas­ier to start with, eas­ier to learn, and has a great com­mu­nity to re­quest help from.

A key part of Rust is far better that what JavaScript has to offer.

A key part of Rust is far bet­ter that what JavaScript has to of­fer.

Why Rust May Be More Attractive than JavaScript

How I built a software render engine from scratch, and you can too.

How I built a soft­ware ren­der en­gine from scratch, and you can too.

Building a Software Render Engine from Scratch

<h1>The Books I Read in February and March 2025</h1>
In a world con­tain­ing TikTok, YouTube and a vast ar­ray of other apps that proﬁt off hu­man at­ten­tion, it takes ef­fort to place our fo­cus on things that truly ben­e­ﬁt our minds.
At least, that is what I would I say on LinkedIn as an ex­pla­na­tion for why I read.
In re­al­ity: I sim­ply en­joy it.
Each month I go back and sum­ma­rize what I’ve learned from the books I’ve read.
In do­ing so, I’ve found that I get both deeper in­sights and greater joy from the lit­er­a­ture.
<h3>Wait! What’s Up With February?</h3>
While I only ﬁn­ished one book in February, I started read­ing sev­eral oth­ers that I ended up ﬁn­ish­ing in March.
It only felt right to com­bine the two months into a sin­gle post.
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2986591a-fa02-4b02-b180-13b27708155c">The Dinner by Herman Koch</a></h2>
Someone con­vinced me to read this book based on its sim­ple premise: the en­tire novel is an ac­count of a sin­gle din­ner.
I was skep­ti­cal.
It is a big book.
How could they pos­si­bly ﬁt that much plot into a sin­gle din­ner?
The an­swer: Koch drip-feeds you in­for­ma­tion about the eclec­tic char­ac­ters in at­ten­dance.
They gain an ad­di­tional di­men­sion that you could­n’t achieve in an­other, more ac­tion-packed book.
I won’t spoil any­thing here, but the end­ing was a com­plete sur­prise to me.
I did not see that com­ing.
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/798488cf-0270-436c-900f-aac5fc26c71d">Gold by Isaac Asimov</a></h2>
I re­mem­ber read­ing Gold for the ﬁrst time on a camp­ing trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
I was cap­ti­vated by the dy­namic short-sto­ries con­tained within.
At the time I be­lieved them to be pure sci­ence ﬁc­tion.
Reading Gold for the sec­ond time re­vealed how wrong I was.
More than one of the ﬁc­tional ideas Asimov pre­sents in the col­lec­tion of short sto­ries has since come to re­al­ity.
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/6844cc6f-2652-415e-8783-d544cf26e3c8">My Grandma Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman</a></h2>
I’ll ad­mit: this novel was chal­leng­ing to ﬁn­ish.
Pros: the main char­ac­ter (an al­most-eight year old girl) is ex­pertly con­veyed in the writ­ing.
Back­man makes clever use of run-on sen­tences to con­vey frus­tra­tion, which is a lit­er­ary de­vice I’ve never seen be­fore.
Fur­ther, the char­ac­ter has an un­usual de­gree of in­sight into every­day as­pects of life.
I found my­self ap­pre­ci­at­ing my every day more plac­ing my­self in her shoes.
Cons: it takes a long time for the in­sights to start com­ing.
An ex­ces­sive de­gree of unim­por­tant in­for­ma­tion is thrown at you right out of the gate.
I had dif­ﬁ­culty main­tain­ing my fo­cus un­til the sec­ond half of the book (when stuff starts heat­ing up).
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/836aff10-4b4e-4b28-8a89-c8ed9e3f966a">Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus</a></h2>
Garmus knocked it out of the park for her ﬁrst novel.
It fol­lows Elizabeth Zott, who, in all re­spects is the per­son I want to be when I grow up.
Lessons in Chemistry is a tes­ta­ment to the value of sub­trac­tion.
The orig­i­nal man­u­script of this book was about twice as long as the ﬁ­nal pub­lished ver­sion.
The au­thor was forced to con­dense it down af­ter get­ting re­jected from sev­eral pub­lish­ers.
It ef­fort shows.
I can­not cap­ture the nov­el’s el­e­gance of prose, cre­ativ­ity in ﬁc­tion, or im­por­tance in moral­ity here.
You need to read this book.

Two months does not mean twice as many.

The Books I Read in February and March 2025

notifications

<h1>Notiﬁcations</h1>
I have found that the ﬁrst cou­ple hours of the day are my most pro­duc­tive.
I try to move te­dious tasks to later so I can fo­cus on solv­ing “hard prob­lems” that need my full at­ten­tion.
In the past, this has been hard to do for one rea­son: GitHub no­ti­ﬁ­ca­tions.
They pull me in and con­sume hours of my time.
Re­spond­ing to and work­ing with OSS con­trib­u­tors is im­por­tant to me, but that can hap­pen later in the day.
So I wrote a lit­tle ViolentMonkey script to hide the no­ti­ﬁ­ca­tions icon dur­ing these early morn­ing hours.
<pre><code class="hljs language-javascript">// ==UserScript==
// @name Hide Notification Indicator
// @namespace Violentmonkey Scripts
// @match https://github.com/*
// @grant none
// @version 1.0
// @author Elijah Potter
// @description 1/29/2025, 8:16:11 AM
// ==/UserScript==

function hideEm() {
 const matches = document.getElementsByClassName(
 "AppHeader-button--hasIndicator",
 );
 for (const element of matches) {
 element.remove();
 }
}

new MutationObserver(hideEm).observe(document, {
 childList: true,
 subtree: true,
});
</code></pre>

Elijah Potter

Notiﬁcations

Other Stuff

Why Rust May Be More Attractive than JavaScript

Building a Software Render Engine from Scratch

The Books I Read in February and March 2025