Vesa Kaihlavirta - Mastering Rust

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: May 2017

Production reference: 1290517

ISBN 978-1-78588-530-3

www.packtpub.com

Vesa Kaihlavirta has been programming since he was five, beginning with C64 Basic. His main professional goal in life is to increase awareness of programming languages and software quality in all industries that use software. He's an Arch Linux Developer Fellow, and has been working in the telecom and financial industry for a decade. Vesa lives in Jyvskyl, central Finland.

Antonin Carette is a PhD student at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of Luxembourg, working on automated ways to classify documents using machine learning.

He believes in Mozilla philosophy and tries to contribute to the Mozilla community, promoting the Rust programming language.

Antonin lives in Thionville, France.

For support files and downloads related to your book, please visit www.PacktPub.com .

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at service@packtpub.com for more details.

At www.PacktPub.com , you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

https://www.packtpub.com/mapt

Get the most in-demand software skills with Mapt. Mapt gives you full access to all Packt books and video courses, as well as industry-leading tools to help you plan your personal development and advance your career.

• Fully searchable across every book published by Packt
• Copy and paste, print, and bookmark content
• On demand and accessible via a web browser

Rust is a new programming language. It offers performance and safety that reaches or even surpasses modern C++, while being a modern language with a relatively low barrier of entry. Rusts momentum, combined with its active and friendly community, promise a great future for the language.

While modern and fluent, Rust is not an entirely easy language. The memory management system keeps track of the life of every entity that is used in your program, and is designed in such a way that this tracking can typically happen entirely at compile time. The Rust programmers burden is to help the compiler when it cannot decide for itself what should happen. Since modern programming is possible to do without ever facing such responsibilities, a modern programmer may not immediately feel comfortable with it.

However, like all expertise and skills, the more difficult it is to attain, the more valuable it is, and this book is here to help you. We cover the basics of Rust briefly, then move to more advanced parts such as the aforementioned memory management, concurrency, and metaprogramming. After working through this book, youll have a very decent foundation for building highly performant and safe software.

, Getting Your Feet Wet, deals with installing the Rust toolset and runs through basic language features in a speedy fashion.

, Using Cargo to Build Your First Program, focuses on the standard build tool, Cargo, and also other development tools and their editor integration.

, Unit Testing and Benchmarking, covers the standard testing tools and practices.

, Types, runs through details and practices related to Rusts type system. We touch the different string types in Rust, arrays and slices, traits, implementations, and generics.

, Error Handling, covers how Rust handles error conditions in a rather unique way. Rust does error handling through its generic type system, instead of relying on exceptions.

, Memory, Lifetimes, and Borrowing, is possibly the most important chapter of the whole book. We see how Rust manages memory and resources, in general, in a safe way without relying on garbage collection.

, Concurrency, covers concurrent and parallel programming in Rust, and a few of the standard primitives (threads, channels, mutexes, and atomic reference counting) that can be used to implement safe concurrency.

, Macros, is where we start looking at the compile-time metaprogramming features of Rust. The so-called macros-by-example is the oldest and most stable form of metaprogramming in Rust.