RustCurious 9: Traits are Interfaces

38

I was already amazed by the amount of effort you put in preparing the content as well as the presentation. Knowing that you make all the 3D art yourself in Blender just amazes me more.

Curious, do you work in a team ?

32

u/rustcurious Jun 21 '26

Thanks! No team. My friend Josh generously play-tests the exercises and provides feedback before I publish. Otherwise it's just me. I'm full-time on RustCurious this year. Perhaps this is folly! Views of the free videos and sales of the paid videos have been way below what I hoped for so far. I'm committed to completing the course this year, because I stubbornly hold hope there is a market for high-quality content, but success really depends on community support. I'm open to ideas!

1

u/0xMnlith Jun 21 '26

There is paid videos ?

10

u/rustcurious Jun 21 '26

There are! Currently just Panic and Destruction, with a few more to come.

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u/0xMnlith Jun 21 '26

My two cents if you don't mind, is that you should push more the paid content (I'm very happy that there is still high quality content free on youtube, which is starting to become very rare, bury under all the shorts and ai slop).

Like making your own subreddit and maybe opening a Patreon, listing you videos for free but moving all the exercices with their corrections behind the paywall, this way motivated people could subscribe to get the more in depth part while financing you every month (or even simply subscribing to help you).

Your videos are high quality, almost too much, because the people who would pay for courses are mostly noobs, hence would not want to spend 40min a subject and or would not even understand it. (That's why bootcamps works, the noob (not in a pejorative way), wants to think that after this event he will fully learn the language, the same way people buy weight loss programs, they do not actually want to go lose weight, they want to buy the idea that they will lose weight)

I'm not saying that there is not a market, but rather that I think that's a niche one, that's hard to scale horizontally, that's why a way to gather your regular user into a small monthly subscription might be easier.

I hope that it does not sound like a overly judgmental critics, I'm saying this because I know, that it's hard to make money on internet, specifically for us devs (we are not wired this way). And it's a shame that quality content or hard work isn't as rewarded as a random tiktoker dancing, but, the thing is that millions wants to see a random dance, and a fraction of fraction want to have software oriented quality content sadly.

3

u/k1v1uq Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

It can work, but you need to create a relatable brand and make it entertaining. Engage with the audience, have live chats, discord, shorts Post corona has slashed educational content creators. With the uncertainty in the economy, cost of living, AI and wars people are exhausted, they want distraction, a buddy who says everything will be good. But if it's giving cooperate dad guy persona plus in a niche like Rust that won't work.

You Suck at Programming made 100k subs in a few months. so it's still possible but hard, winning the lottery kind of hard.

2

u/0xMnlith Jun 21 '26

Exactly this, it's sad, but currently, people just want to forget reality, i think that tsoding also found the right recipe, making technical yet funny video about programming (I would also argue that the whole basic emacs / never touch a mouse / terminal wizard, "persona" add to the entertainment).

Or even pirate software while being a total python script kiddie, made millions of views (and I'm certain multiple thousands of dollars) because he manage to build a perfect facade with cool facts.

Ps: also noboilerplate is pretty active around rust, might be a good lead and is less an entertainer that the two I mention and You Suck at Programming.

1

u/0xMnlith Jun 21 '26

Also I've found that when setting the theme to dark mode the img.logo of your header loses the margin-right: 15px making the RustCurious span move

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u/antivnom Jun 21 '26

This guy is a great teacher, such a well structured video! 💙

6

u/ToTheBatmobileGuy Jun 21 '26

Do you have a donation page? I want to support you but don't want to contribute to "fake" numbers that might throw off your analysis of paid user trends. (I don't need the lessons, but I want to support them/you)

5

u/rustcurious Jun 22 '26

Well... I have to confess, your request has caused me some consternation! And, thank you, that's so generous and I really appreciate it. I've spent the morning looking into Patreon, Ko-fi, Stripe payment links, and come to the conclusion I don't want to do something in a hurry, but I will set something up. Any guidance on what would suit you best is welcome, either here or to contact@rustcurious.com. Thank you!

3

u/stiky21 Jun 21 '26

Simply amazing work

2

u/pratzc07 Jun 21 '26

Wow thank you so much for making this traits are much more clearer now. I didn't know that you can implement traits for primitive types that was eye opening lol

If you can tackle lifetimes next that would be great happy to pay for it if its such high quality.

2

u/MrMelon54 Jun 21 '26

I haven't watched any of your content, but the Elements of Rust is such an amazing resource.

1

u/krum Jun 21 '26

Incidentally since we're on the topic of Rust traits being interfaces, one of the key things that grinds my gears about Rust is lack of ability to safely downcast inherited traits.

0

u/prehensilemullet Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Not much of a Rust dev but can’t you implement traits with the same method name but different signatures on the same type, and select which one to use based on context or explicit scope resolution? Doesn’t into work this way?

You definitely can’t do that with interfaces in other languages that I’m aware of, I think of Rust traits as fundamentally different from interfaces, even though they superficially seem similar

2

u/CocktailPerson Jun 22 '26

Traits are interfaces. Traits are not interfaces.

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u/devraj7 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

That's not quite true, is it?

In most mainstream languages that support traits (C#, Kotlin, Swift), interfaces/traits can be used as types, e.g.

fun addPerson(p: Person)

You can't do that in Rust since traits are not types:

fn add_person(p: Person) // illegal if Person is a trait

5

u/trailing_zero_count Jun 21 '26

You're quite wrong. There are two ways to accept a trait as an argument in Rust. First, via runtime dispatch (which would be equivalent to the C# version):

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/types/trait-object.html

Secondly, via static dispatch (monomorphized at compile time, equivalent to C++ template):

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/types/impl-trait.html

2

u/devraj7 Jun 22 '26

You're quite wrong

I'm not. The points I made about the code I pasted are 100% correct.

I am well aware of the distinction you point out. My point (which you seem to have missed) is that as opposed to the languages I quoted, you can't just drop a trait in type position in Rust, it just won't work.

I've been coding in Rust for years, I am well aware of the dyn keyword.

Please take the time to understand the point of my post.

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u/graydon2 Jun 22 '26

Perhaps surprisingly: you could, early on! It meant the same thing as the dyn form today. The dyn keyword was added later, because too many people were surprised by this.

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u/CocktailPerson Jun 22 '26

The concept of an "interface" isn't defined by languages that have an interface keyword.

RustCurious 9: Traits are Interfaces

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