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

Iterators


We glimpsed iterators in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Rust. To recap, an iterator is any ordinary type that can walk over elements of a collection type in one of three ways: via self&self, or  &mut self. They are not a new concept and mainstream language such as C++ and Python have them already though that in Rust, they can appear surprising at first due to their form as an associated type trait. Iterators are used quite frequently in idiomatic Rust code when dealing with collection types.

To understand how they work, let's look at the definition of the Iterator trait from the std::iter module:

pub trait Iterator {
    type Item;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item>;
    // other default methods omitted
}

The Iterator trait is an associated type trait which mandates the two items, to be defined for any implementing type. First is the associated type, Item, which specifies what item the iterator yields. Second is the next method, which is called every...