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

What is metaprogramming?


"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

– Alan Kay

Any program, regardless of the language used, contains two entities: data and instructions that manipulate the data. The usual flow of a program is mostly concerned with manipulating data. The issue with instructions, though, is that once you write them, it's like they've been carved into stone, and so they are non-malleable. It would be more enabling if we could treat instructions as data and generate new instructions using code. Metaprogramming provides exactly that!

 

It's a programming technique where you can write code that has the ability to generate new code. Depending on the language, it can be approached in two ways: at runtime or at compile time. Runtime metaprogramming is available in dynamic languages such as Python, Javascript, and Lisp. For compiled languages, it's not possible to generate instructions at runtime because these languages perform the ahead of time compilation of programs. However...