Day two of Stellar DevComp focused on Rust fundamentals for Soroban smart contract development. Instructor covered data types, variables, functions, and the ownership model that makes Rust ideal for blockchain applications.
This was day two of the Stellar DevComp, a cohort program run by Hada Initiative in partnership with Stellar East Africa. The session provided an in-depth introduction to Rust programming language, emphasizing why Rust is chosen for Soroban smart contracts. Key topics included data types (signed/unsigned integers, booleans, characters, floats, strings), variable mutability, and function declarations. The instructor explained Rust's memory safety mechanisms, compile-time error detection, and deterministic execution. Practical examples showed how to create a new Rust project using cargo, declare variables with type annotations, and write functions. The session highlighted Rust's advantages for blockchain: no garbage collection, high performance, and strict type safety. Participants worked through installation issues and asked questions about data type differences and project initialization.