Introduction

This is a (non-comprehensive) guide for C# and .NET developers that are completely new to the Rust programming language. Some concepts and constructs translate fairly well between C#/.NET and Rust, but which may be expressed differently, whereas others are a radical departure, like memory management. This guide provides a brief comparison and mapping of those constructs and concepts with concise examples.

The original authors¹ of this guide were themselves C#/.NET developers who were completely new to Rust. This guide is the compilation of the knowledge acquired by the authors writing Rust code over the course of several months. It is the guide the authors wish they had when they started on their Rust journey. That said, the authors would encourage you to read books and other material available on the Web to embrace Rust and its idioms rather than attempting to learn it exclusively through the lens of C# and .NET. Meanwhile, this guide can help answers some question quickly, like: Does Rust support inheritance, threading, asynchronous programming, etc.?

Assumptions:

• Reader is a seasoned C#/.NET developer.
• Reader is completely new to Rust.

Goals:

• Provide a brief comparison and mapping of various C#/.NET topics to their counterparts in Rust.
• Provide links to Rust reference, book and articles for further reading on topics.

Non-goals:

• Discussion of design patterns and architectures.
• Tutorial on the Rust language.
• Reader is proficient in Rust after reading this guide.
• While there are short examples that contrast C# and Rust code for some topics, this guide is not meant to be a cookbook of coding recipes in the two languages.