Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By : Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger
Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By: Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust is a powerful language with a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. This Learning Path is filled with clear and simple explanations of its features along with real-world examples, demonstrating how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. You’ll get started with an introduction to Rust data structures, algorithms, and essential language constructs. Next, you will understand how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You’ll also learn to implement sorting and searching algorithms, such as Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. As you progress, you’ll pick up on using Rust for systems programming, network programming, and the web. You’ll then move on to discover a variety of techniques, right from writing memory-safe code, to building idiomatic Rust libraries, and even advanced macros. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be able to implement Rust for enterprise projects, writing better tests and documentation, designing for performance, and creating idiomatic Rust code. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Mastering Rust - Second Edition by Rahul Sharma and Vesa Kaihlavirta • Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust by Claus Matzinger
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Memory management pitfalls


In languages with a GC, dealing with memory is abstracted away from the programmer. You declare and use the variables in your code, and how they get deallocated is an implementation detail you don't have to worry about. A low-level system programming language such as C/C++, on the other hand, does nothing to hide these details from the programmer, and provides nearly no safety. Here, programmers are given the responsibility of deallocating memory via manual free calls. Now, if we look at the majority of  Common Vulnerabilities & Exposure (CVEs) in software related to memory management, it shows that we humans are not very good at this! Programmers can easily create hard-to-debug errors by allocating and deallocating values in the wrong order, or may even forget to deallocate used memory, or cast pointers illegally. In C, nothing stops you from creating a pointer out of an integer and dereferencing it somewhere, only to see the program crash later. Also, it...