Bringing Rust to C#: Oxide and Oxide.Http

Rust is a language I’ve admired for a long time now, from a slight distance. I’ve read about the borrow checker, perused the standard crates, and read up on Cargo and the way that Rust applications and libraries are built, tested, and shipped. I appreciate its striving to be a systems-level language that also cares about safety and developer productivity.

I haven’t written as much Rust as I’d like to (though I did start a few small projects here and there), but that didn’t stop me from thinking that maybe some of its standard library features have a place in the C# world. I found myself particularly fond of the Option and Result types, and their ability to better the flow of my code. Option’s API is Nullable<T> on steroids, and Result provides an elegant way to express an error that doesn’t require using out parameters or custom exceptions, while at the same time providing a delightful API that lets you build processing pipelines that preserve errors and lazily evaluate steps.

The adventure started when one afternoon about a month ago, when I decided I wanted to see if I could implement Option in C#. I knew I wanted to preserve as much of the Rust API as made sense, including the simple construction of Some and None as function calls: Some(5), None<int>(), etc. I opened up Workbooks (use what you know, right?) and started hacking away. After a little while, I had my first pass at the Option API surface—I stuffed it in a Gist, Within a few hours, I decided to make it into a library called Oxide—after all, what else is Rust?

My initial commit brought in the API almost exactly as it was in the Gist. Over the rest of the day, I refined the API slightly, added a ton of tests (inspired by the Rust documentation’s example assertions), and wrapped up. A week later, I decided to add Result, which I implemented largely the same way (a base class, with derived Ok<T, E> and Err<T, E> classes).

Since then I’ve refined the API for both, added a priority queue implementation, added a small library of HTTP helper methods (Oxide.Http), received my first external contribution from Jérémie Laval who contributed a very nice set of convenience methods to enable async/await with Option, and finally published a NuGet (when I was forced to by wanting to use Oxide in another project but wanted to avoid submodules).

I hope to keep working on Oxide—there will probably be more APIs that I would like to borrow from Rust, or more functional/Rust-inspired API that would be useful for C# developers. Contributions of all kinds are welcome: bug reports, feature requests, documentation, etc. You can find Oxide on GitHub—please use the issue tracker there for everything. :)