Balbaert - Rust Essentials

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: May 2015

Second edition: November 2017

Production reference: 1061117

ISBN 978-1-78839-001-9

www.packtpub.com

Ivo Balbaert is currently a lecturer in (web) programming and databases at CVO Antwerpen, a community college in Belgium. He received a PhD in applied physics from University of Antwerp in 1986. He has worked for 20 years in the software industry as a developer and consultant in several companies, and he has worked for 10 years as a project manager at the University Hospital of Antwerp. From 2000 onward, he switched to teaching, developing software, and writing technical books.

Tom Verbesselt started his career as a software engineer in the amazing early world of 3D scanning and printing. However, he couldn't ignore his passion for teaching, and so he became a lecturer at the graduate program at CVO Antwerpen (Antwerp, Belgium). He started his own IT consultancy firm in 2003 and cofounded OWIC, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching open source software tools, in 2016. Currently, he is the head of the graduate program in IT at CVO Antwerpen, and he is passionate about mobile, web, and new technology.

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Rust is a stable, open source, and compiled programming language that finally promises software developers the utmost safety--not only type safety, but also memory safety. The compiler carefully checks all uses of variables and pointers so that common problems from C/C++ and other languages, such as pointers to wrong memory locations or null references, are a thing of the past. Possible problems are detected at compilation time, and Rust programs execute at speeds comparable with their C++ counterparts.

Rust runs with a very light runtime, which does not perform garbage collection. Again, the compiler takes care of generating the code that frees all resources at the right time. This means Rust can run in very constrained environments, such as embedded or real-time systems. The built-in safety also guarantees concurrency without data-race problems.

It is clear that Rust is applicable in all use cases where until now C and C++ were the preferred languages and that it will do a better job at it, at least with regard to safety and robustness.

Rust is also a very rich language: it has concepts (such as immutability by default) and constructs (such as traits) that enable developers to write code in a high-level functional and object-oriented style.

The original goal of Rust was to serve as the language for writing a new safe browser engine, devoid of the many security flaws that plague existing browsers such as the Servo project from Mozilla Research.

The goal of this book is to give you a firm foundation for starting to develop in Rust. Throughout the book, we emphasize the three pillars of Rust: safety, performance, and sound concurrency. We will discuss where Rust differs from other programming languages and why this is the case. The code examples are not chosen ad hoc, but they are oriented as part of an ongoing project for building a game so that there is a sense of cohesion and evolution in the examples.