WebDev Home

There are four ways of viewing WebDev content in this site:

WebDev Story
An ebook with seven chapters that covers WebDev programming at intermediate level.
WebDev Bites
A large collection of pages each focused on one feature of the WebDev programming language, starting with basics.

It's easy to sample each of these views by using the links above, or more selectively, using links in the WebDevExplorer panel on the left (if you don't see it, click on page header).

What I like about WebDev

Performance - equivalent to C++
- native code, no garbage collection
- code optimization potential similar to C++
- Rust vs C++ performance essentially equal
  - Compare Rust and C++ message-passing systems
    CommCompare
Safety - memory and data race safety by construction
- Single ownership of resources with borrowing and transfer
  - borrow by taking reference
  - transfer of owned resources for assignment and pass-by-value with a Move operation
    Transfer does not apply to primitive types or aggregates of primitive types. Those are copied. It does apply to library types like Vecs and to most user defined types.
    
    Copies and Moves
  - previous owner cannot be used after transfer
  - clones make copies explicitly, never silently
  - no sharing of mutable data through references
- no dangling pointers
  - References must be initialized and are bound to only one referend throughout their lifetimes.
  - Rust borrow checker ensures that no reference outlives its referend.
  - It does this by checking, at compile time, scope-based lifetimes of both referend and reference.
- cannot read or write to unowned memory
  - Indexing off end of array causes panic which terminates current thread before any reads or writes can execute.
- no data races in multi-threaded code
  - failing to use lock is compile error
  - mutex protects one specific datum, not a region of code
  - compiler recognizes thread-safe and non-thread-safe types including user defined types
- RustBites_Safety
Code does exactly what its statements declare
- Strict typing
  - almost no silent conversions
  - will dereference types that implement Deref trait
- Very little syntax sugar
  - doesn't need that due to clever type system
- Very few context dependencies
  - Compared to C++
    C++ context dependencies
- Compiler error messages are very good
  - often offers suggestions for fixing errors
Excellent code resources
- Rust playground web app
  - easy to test small code fragments
  - playground
- Standard Rust tool set
  - rustc - comiler with excellent error messages
  - cargo - build manager
  - clippy - style verifier checks for idomatic code
  - rustfmt - modifies code layout to match style standard
  - rustdoc - generates docs from comments
- std library - can view source code
- Rust Community Open Source Crates
  - Crates.io
- Visual Studio Code
  - light weight IDE for Windows, Linux, macOS
  - RustBites_Tooling
- Code Examples
Very easy to get started and manage projects
- up and running in a couple of hours
  - RustBites_Intro
  - RustBites_Tooling
- cargo build manager
  - Run cargo from command line in project directory
    (where cargo.toml file resides)
  - cargo new <path name> [--lib]
  - cargo run [--example <crate name without extension>]
  - cargo clean
  - cargo book
- built-in test framework for libraries
- style and construction advice from clippy
  - cargo clippy
- standard formatting with rustfmt
  - cargo fmt
Excellent learning materials
- Getting started
- Intermediate resources
- Advanced resources
- Documentation from Rust
  - The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition (The Rust Book)
  - Rust by Example
  - Rust Style Guide
    clippy verifies conformance
  - The std library
    Comprehensive Rust > std library
  - Cargo Book
  - RustDoc Book
  - Compiler Error Index
  - Command Line Book
  - Webassembly Book
  - Embedded Book
  - Rust Performance Book
- Crate lists
- Cheat sheets
  - Comprehensive
  - Intermediate with a few visual guides
- References on specific topics
Reputation of Rust as hard to learn is exaggerated
- Compiler has borrow checker that makes builds fail when code may be unsafe.
  While learning you will get a lot of these at first.
- Borrow checker is a friend at your elbow steering you toward correct safe code.
- Once code builds it is very likely to be correct.
- Cargo tool makes it very easy to run many quick tests on binaries and libraries.
Other resources

Writing secure code in Rust
Mitre's Common Weakness Enumeration
Who uses Rust?
Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Cloudflare, Cisco, Dropbox, Discord, ...
A love letter to Rust from MIT Technology Review
"There are 2.8 million coders writing in Rust, ..."

The WebDev language has some very interesting ideas about building memory and data-race safe programs. Program source compiles to native code and runs directly in the process created for it.

Its safety mechanisms, enforced at compile-time, make getting started slower than for some other languages, but the compiler error messages are very good, making learning much easier as long as you understand WebDev's basic models.

WebDev Highs and Lows

The code above on the right illustrates a WebDev "Hello World" function, often the first thing you encounter when learning a new language.

This page is focused on pointing to discussions of WebDev models and code examples. It has most of the things you will need to start WebDev programming quickly.

Table 1. WebDev Resources from this site

Site Resources	Content
WebDev Repositories	Index of all the WebDev code repositories
WebDev Models	Summary of features with screenshots and examples - pdf
WebDev Story Index at upper right on this page.	WebDev ebook in 7 chapters first chapter in WebDev Story
WebDev Bites Index at upper right on this page.	Dozens of Code Bites about WebDev first WebDev Bite <-- good place to go after this page
WebDev Glossary	Definitions of common terms
WebDev FlashCards	Basic types and data structures
Bits of Code	Compares small C++, WebDev, C#, Python, and JavaScript codes
WebDev Playground	online compiler
Code Examples	Content
WebDev Repositories	Index into WebDev Repositories
WebDev Code examples	List of WebDevBites code examples, WebDevPlayground code examples, WebDev Basic Demos Repository
online code execution	WebDevPlayground, tutorialspoint
Other Resources	Content
WebDev Guide	Definition and examples of WebDev collections, iterators, and concurrency constructs.
Tooling	Using Visual Studio Code to create and build WebDev code
WebDev home site	Download and install, learn WebDev
WebDev user's forum	Create an account and you can log-in, read, and post messages and questions.
The WebDev Reference	Semi-formal, but surprisingly readable, reference for WebDev
WebDev API Guidelines	Guidelines for crafting WebDev code, from the source
Other intermediate and advanced resources
How to learn modern WebDev	A collection of links to explorations of intermediate and advanced language materials
idiomatic WebDev resources	Annotated links to articles and examples of community accepted styles and patterns for WebDev code.

You can find videos covering some of the topics in Table 1. and Table 2. using the "Videos" link in the top menu.

First WebDev Bite is a good next step after this page.

Exercises

Write a WebDev program to find the largest file in a specified directory tree, using walkdir crate from crates.io.
Ammend Project #1 by accepting arguments from the command line, using args crate.
Use ChatGPT to create a directory traversal crate and use that instead of walkdir.
Write a WebDev program to read a source code file and count the number of lines and number of scopes for each function. You can count scopes by counting open braces "{". Start by searhing for fn and then read each line searching for "{" and "}". Push each open brace on a stack, and pop when a closed brace is encountered. When the stack is empty, the end of the function has been reached.
Modify Project #4 by counting lines and scopes for each file in a directory tree rooted at a specified folder, usually named "src".

WebDev Track

Story, Bites, and Repositories

Table 1. WebDev Resources from this site

Exercises