name: preferences-rust-development description: Rust development conventions covering domain modeling, error handling, API design, testing, performance, and type-level programming. Load when working with .rs files or Rust projects.

Rust development

This guide integrates functional domain modeling (FDM) with pragmatic Rust practices from Microsoft engineers.

Primary lens: Functional domain modeling - type-driven design encoding business logic in the type system, making invariants explicit and violations compile-time errors.

Complementary guidance: Microsoft Pragmatic Rust Guidelines - industry best practices for API design, testing, performance, and safety.

Philosophical reconciliations:

• Panic semantics: Panics for true programming bugs only (contract violations, impossible states). Domain and infrastructure errors use Result types. Good type design reduces both panic surface and error handling complexity.
• Dependency injection: Prefer concrete types for domain logic, enums for testable I/O (sans-io), generics for algorithm parameters, dyn Trait only for true runtime polymorphism. This hierarchy complements FDM's emphasis on explicit, type-safe dependencies.
• Type-driven design: Both approaches emphasize making invalid states unrepresentable. Smart constructors, state machines, and strong types eliminate bug categories.

Role in multi-language architectures: Rust often serves as the base IO/Result layer in multi-language monad transformer stacks, providing memory-safe, high-performance foundations for effect composition.

Contents

This guide is organized into focused topic files for easy navigation and AI agent efficiency.

References

Primary sources

This document integrates guidance from:

• Functional domain modeling: See ~/.claude/skills/preferences-domain-modeling/SKILL.md for universal patterns, ~/.claude/skills/preferences-architectural-patterns/SKILL.md for application structure, ~/.claude/skills/preferences-railway-oriented-programming/SKILL.md for error composition
• Microsoft Pragmatic Rust Guidelines: https://microsoft.github.io/rust-guidelines/agents/all.txt - comprehensive production Rust guidance from Microsoft engineers
• Rust API Guidelines: https://rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines/ - official Rust API design checklist

Related documents

• ~/.claude/skills/preferences-distributed-systems/SKILL.md - universal distributed systems decision framework
• ~/.claude/skills/preferences-theoretical-foundations/SKILL.md - category-theoretic underpinnings
• ~/.claude/skills/preferences-algebraic-data-types/SKILL.md - sum/product type patterns