WebZero Hackerhouse Rust Workshop - An Intro to Rust

The slides are available on hackMD, but also here in the repo:HACKMD.md.. Examples for teaching a quick "Rust 101" is also available: EXAMPLES.md The hosted version can be found here.

This workshop focuses on two main objectives, mainly:

Providing a basic introduction to Rust, and the necessary features to complete the workshop
Complete the "story" using those concepts

Note that some of these concepts are not necessarily blockchain specific, but analogies can easily be made, making this a versatile workshop.

This workshop was created to take around 1 hour, as it has them potentially install Rust, then go over its basics and how they roughly work.

It is also catered to a Substrate-style version of development, in which types are used as the bounds for configuring various traits. The goal is to expose the students to a generic-style API, although this isn't compressive, it serves as an intro to some of these concepts.

Project Structure

This project is a workspace, primarily so that we can explain what one is. It doesn't use it in any meaningful way yet, but it's a place to keep all of our crates.

scratchpad - where you will do the majority of your work
factory - an implemented version of what is covered in the workshop (cheat sheet basically)

Story: The Factory

For this workshop, we will go launch a Factory. This factory has the following flow:

We want to process a raw material to a product (Product).
The processes, in which our products go on to be processed
Each Process also has a configuration, in which we utilize traits
Lastly, once the Product passes its specific process, it is saved as a completed item in our "storage" (a HashMap, in our case).

A completed version of this is located within factory, which one could theoritcally turn into a library then use in scratchpad (it would be good practice).

Analogies to draw

The factory is really a sort of state machine, accepting inputs, transforming them somehow, then storing them again (in the future, it may be more prudent to represent the factory this way).
A process is analogous to a state transition. It is also kind of a glorified conversion.
The factory, could in theory, receive products from other factories to further process.

An example scenario: IronOre -> Steel

In our scenario, we have a raw material, iron ore (IronOre), and we wish to process it into steel (Steel).

We must declare a new Product, Steel
Our process accepts IronOre, and outputs steel for push_along_the_belt
Steel gets deposited into a HashMap as a "complete product".

Rust Concepts to Highlight

Note that we used some concepts of generic trait design in that we defined how a process behaves, but we didn't have to define the process itself.
The use of associated types within the factory makes it easy for us to access the types we need to actually process materials

Example steps to follow

See the hackMD slide readme for more detail: HACKMD..