FAQ

Why Use Rust Core Even If I Don't Know Rust?

From a language perspective we believe Dart is sadly lacking in a few areas, of which this package solves:

  • Dart utilizes unchecked try/catch exceptions. Handling errors as values is preferred for maintainability, thus the Result type.
  • Dart has nullable types but you cannot do null or non-null specific operations without a bunch of if statements. Option<T> fixes this with no runtime cost and you can easily switch back and forth to nullable types since it is just a zero cost extension type of T?.
  • Dart is missing the functionality of Rust's ? operator, so we implemented it in Dart.
  • Dart is missing a built in Cell type or equivalent (and OnceCell/LazyCell).
  • Dart's List type is an array/vector union (it's growable or non-growable). This is not viewable at the type layer, which may lead to runtime exceptions and encourages using growable Lists everywhere even when you do not need to, which is less performant. So we added Arr (array).
  • Dart has no concept of a slice type, so allocating sub-lists is the only method, which is not that efficient. So we added Slice<T>.
  • Dart's between isolate communication is by ports (ReceivePort/SendPort), which is untyped and horrible, we standardized this with introducing channel for typed bi-directional isolate communication.
  • Dart's iteration methods are lacking for Iterable and Iterator (there are none! just moveNext() and current), while Rust has an abundance of useful methods. So we introduced Rust's Iterator.

I Know Rust, Can This Package Benefit My Team and I?

Absolutely! In fact, our team both programs in and love Dart and Rust. From a team and user perspective, having one common api across two different languages greatly increases our development velocity in a few ways:

  • Context switching is minimized, the api's across the two languages are the same.
  • Shrinking the knowledge gap between Rust and Dart developers.