Feedback After 6 Months of Using RUST

The generated image is based on the simple prompt: "Create a humorous image highlighting the difficulty of programming in RUST." Even if the result is not perfect, I find it very relevant, and it made me laugh. I think every RUST programmer has struggled with the borrow checker.

I have developed a chess game in RUST offering a UCI allowing engine tournament. The link is the following: https://github.com/christophelc/chess_rust

The program is based on RUST and Actix actors.

• UCI interface: Compatible with tournament play.
• Engine algorithms:
  • Iterative Deepening depth-first search with alpha beta pruning (other engine: minimax, mat solver, MCTS experiment)
  • Additional experiments include Minimax, mate solver, and MCTS.
• Heuristics: 
  • Null move pruning
  • Capture horizon effect
  • Move preordering
  • Transposition tables
  • Killer move heuristic
  • Aspiration windows
• FEN, SAN, EPD notations

Feedback and Observations:

• RUST Ecosystem:
  • Cargo offers many useful tools like cargo fmt for code formatting and cargo clippy for improving code quality.
• Testing
  • Unit and Integration tests are well integrated
• Learning Rust with AI Assistance:
  • AI tools can make learning Rust easier, but it’s essential to fully understand the code to stay on the right track.
• Actix Framework:
  • Actix is an excellent framework, and it generally removes the need to spawn threads manually.
  • However, be cautious when performing long computations in the Actix event loop, as this can block it.
• Expressivness
  • Less powerful than Scala
  • Sometimes, we need to split an expression in several parts due to temporary objects not managed by the compiler
• Type Management:
  • Be mindful of type leaking. I use generics sparingly to avoid unnecessary complexity.
• Concurrency in Rust:
  • Sharing objects safely between threads often requires using Mutex and Arc.