Rust, gently
A field guide to Rust
Track III · Distillations and essays

The Rust mental model,
distilled.

Two stacks below. Distillations are the fast-path mental model (ownership, errors, async, the five questions for any Rust file). Essays are longer pieces on the substrate around Rust (the JIT, the memory hierarchy, what a query becomes, where allocations live). For the long-form Book version of any concept, jump to the corresponding Book chapter.

Distillations.

10 pages · plain language first

Each page ends with an Agent review lens callout, what to grep for in agent-written Rust on this topic.

  1. 01
    Project shape
    Where code lives. The files you actually open.
    Cargo · workspaces
  2. 02
    Reading Rust
    Decode signatures, structs, methods, every symbol.
    Syntax decoder
  3. 03
    Data model
    The three ways to define data, and when to use each.
    Structs · enums · traits
  4. 04
    Errors
    The half of agent-written bugs that live here.
    Option · Result · ?
  5. 05
    Ownership
    The thing Rust is famous for, demystified.
    Borrow checker
  6. 06
    Iterators
    Loops, closures, lazy chains.
    Functional pipelines
  7. 07
    Modules
    How Rust projects are organized.
    Visibility · crates
  8. 08
    Async
    Async rules, footguns, and Send/Sync.
    Tokio · futures
  9. 09
    Testing
    Built-in tools. No framework wars.
    Cargo gates
  10. 10
    Compiler errors
    Read errors as questions, not failures.
    rustc as tutor

Essays.

7 pages · with diagrams

Longer pieces with SVG diagrams. Each one cross-links to the lexicon and names a JVM or C++ tradeoff honestly.

  1. 01
    What the JIT knows
    Three computation curves. Where Rust sits, where the JVM still wins. SVG diagram of warm vs cold performance.
    Anchor · JVM and AOT
  2. 02
    Anatomy of a query
    Five transformations between SQL and result, with a flowchart. Where most queries get slow.
    Database internals
  3. 03
    Columnar vs row
    The same twelve values, two ways. Why analytical engines all pick column layout.
    Memory layout
  4. 04
    Memory hierarchy
    Six tiers from L1 to cross-region network. If L1 took one second, the network would take two years.
    Hardware substrate
  5. 05
    Async, illustrated
    An async fn becomes a state machine. The runtime calls poll. All the rules fall out of this picture.
    Runtime mechanics
  6. 06
    Where allocations happen
    Thirteen common Rust patterns marked free or one-alloc. The map for hot-path scrutiny.
    Performance reference
  7. 07
    Flame graphs
    Most of a JVM flame graph is the JVM. Most of a Rust one is your code. Drawn out side by side.
    Field note