[imiric]

At the same time, we celebrate rewriting small Unix tools in Rust. How is that different?

You shouldn't view someone building a toy project in a negative light, even if it's for learning purposes. It demonstrates curiosity and interest in learning, and is part of what being a hacker is all about.

Maybe it's not frontpage worthy for this crowd, but it's certainly worth mentioning in a CV, especially for junior engineers. It can serve as a good topic of discussion during the interview, for example.