I'm very curious about better ways to explain not just Rust pointers, but also other features that contribute to Rust's unique feel, like inherited mutability and linear types. These things are all interrelated and there are some emerging best practices, but they are still unfolding as the language evolves and people gain experience with it.
I'd recommend reading Tom Lee's post (linked previously) on the subject of pointers.
On the subject of libraries, there is a lot of work yet. The plan has been to get the language stabilized then start focusing on libraries and tooling.
The core and standard libraries are not very consistent, either in style or quality. The I/O modules (both file and network) are particularly problematic at the moment, so even a simple networking application will be difficult. Some folks have had success though by writing their own bindings to BSD sockets, ZeroMQ, mongrel, etc. (bindings for which are in cargo).
Outside of core and standard there have been a lot of graphics- and math-oriented libraries. Multimedia, particularly games, seems to be a very promising domain for Rust. There are a number of useful libraries that are not in cargo because cargo is not yet powerful enough to deal with their build requirements.
Some of the easiest, and potentially most useful, code to write when getting started are re-implementations of popular libraries, protocols, etc. in Rust. For example, I really wanted to implement mustache templates in Rust but somebody beat me to it.
Where 2012 was the year of stabilizing the language, 2013 will be for cleaning up and redesigning the libraries, and hopefully making all the tooling more usable and featureful.
I'd recommend reading Tom Lee's post (linked previously) on the subject of pointers.
On the subject of libraries, there is a lot of work yet. The plan has been to get the language stabilized then start focusing on libraries and tooling.
The core and standard libraries are not very consistent, either in style or quality. The I/O modules (both file and network) are particularly problematic at the moment, so even a simple networking application will be difficult. Some folks have had success though by writing their own bindings to BSD sockets, ZeroMQ, mongrel, etc. (bindings for which are in cargo).
Outside of core and standard there have been a lot of graphics- and math-oriented libraries. Multimedia, particularly games, seems to be a very promising domain for Rust. There are a number of useful libraries that are not in cargo because cargo is not yet powerful enough to deal with their build requirements.
Some of the easiest, and potentially most useful, code to write when getting started are re-implementations of popular libraries, protocols, etc. in Rust. For example, I really wanted to implement mustache templates in Rust but somebody beat me to it.
Where 2012 was the year of stabilizing the language, 2013 will be for cleaning up and redesigning the libraries, and hopefully making all the tooling more usable and featureful.