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

Trifecta of memory safety


The concepts that we will explore next are the core tenets of Rust's memory safety and its zero cost abstraction principle. They enable Rust to detect memory safety violations in a program at compile time, provide automatic freeing of resources when their scope ends, and much more. We call these concepts ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes. Ownership is kind of like the core principle, while borrowing and lifetimes are type system extensions to the language, enforcing and sometimes relaxing the ownership principle in different contexts in code to ensure compile-time memory management. Let's elaborate on these ideas.

Ownership

The notion of a true owner of a resource in a program differs across languages. Here, by resource, we collectively refer to any variable holding a value on the heap or the stack, or a variable holding an open file descriptor, a database connection socket, a network socket, and similar things. All of them occupy some memory from the time they...