Notes from Blog Engine Rewrite in Rust

Motivation and Problems

For the “Love of the Game”, the game being teaching myself enough Rust to have trenchant opinions on other languages. Things I’d like it to do:

  • Markdown Rendering.
    There’s CommonMark and GFM. I have special markup that will require me to extend these. Not sure if I’ll need both specs.
  • TSX for templating.
    Because I argue it’s the best templating language ever.
  • SASS and Tailwind Rendering.
    Use grass for the former.
  • Live-Reloading
    For posts and all assets.
  • Asset Management
    Thumbnails, optimized WebP generation, folder organization.

Development Log (of sorts)

Ah the famous learning curve. But you can be very productive with Rust if you know what to focus on. For baby Rustaceans like me who’re prototyping, the big things are:

  • Not fighting the famed Borrow Checker
  • Not using lifetimes as much as possible
  • Just waving away any possible errors for now
  • Knowing about and using popular libraries

That’s it. Concretely,

  • clone and own everything to avoid fighting the borrow checker and dealing with explicit lifetimes.
  • unwrap or expect to avoid handling the failure cases inside Result and Option.

I’ll add a few more:

  • Use String instead of &str (avoids borrowing/owning)
  • Use Vec<T> to get owned collections (avoids borrowing/owning)
  • Use Arc<T> to share T across threads (avoids lifetimes)

So yeah, you’re side-stepping what makes Rust ‘great’ in the first place. But going back and dealing with these things is for the next iteration of your app. Super-easy to do so: grep for these things and work at them.

Other Prototyping Shortcuts

  • Use dbg! a lot.
  • TODO: Complete this.

Datetime

Rust’s STDLIB is as shit as Python’s with datetime manipulation (which is rather disappointing). Here’s things it can and cannot do:

Action Can it?
Current timestamp Yes
Measure elapsed time Yes
Add seconds to timestamp Yes
Get year/month/day No
Format as 2026-10-09 No
Parse ISO 8601 dates No
Time zones No
Calendar arithmetic No

Like Python you are expected to use richer libraries: chrono or jiff (I like the latter.)

Strings

Concatenation

Just use format!(). Rust’s version of Python f-strings.

Also, .display() returns &str and .to_str() returns Option<&str>. So you used:

let pattern = format!("{}/**/*.md", content_dir.display());

Here’s some concatenation drama:

let a = String::from("foo");
let s = a + "/bar";            // ok: String + &str
let s = "foo" + "bar";         // error: &str + &str
let s = "foo".to_owned() + "bar"; // ok

Miscellaneous

HAD TO ENABLE “AUTO COMMENT BLOCKS” PLUGIN FOR FUCKING COMMENT CONTINUATIONS (and that too with Shift+Enter)

References