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

Global values


Apart from variable and type declarations, Rust also allows us to define global values that can be accessed from anywhere in the program. They follow the naming convention of every letter being uppercase. These are of two kinds: constants and statics. There are also constant functions, which can be called to initialize these global values. Let's explore constants first.

 

Constants

The first form of global values are constants. Here's how we can define one:

// constants.rs

const HEADER: &'static [u8; 4] = b"Obj\0"; 

fn main() {
    println!("{:?}", HEADER);
}

We use the const keyword to create constants. As constants aren't declared with the let keyword, specifying types is a must when creating them. Now, we can use HEADER where we would use the byte literal, Obj\.  b"" is a convenient syntax to create a sequence of bytes of the &'static [u8; n] type, as in a 'static reference to a fixed-sized array of bytes. Constants represent concrete values and don't have any memory...