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

When to use and not use Rust macros


One of the advantages of using macros is that they don't evaluate their arguments eagerly like functions do, which is one of the motivations to use macros other than functions.

Note

By eager evaluation, we mean that a function call like foo(bar(2)) will first evaluate bar(2) and then pass its value to foo. Contrary to that, this is a lazy evaluation, which is what you see in iterators.

A general rule of thumb is that macros can be used in situations where functions fail to provide the desired solution, where you have code that is quite repetitive, or in cases where you need to inspect the structure of your types and generate code at compile time. Taking examples from real use cases, Rust macros are used in a lot of cases, such as the following:

  • Augmenting the language syntax by creating custom Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)
  • Writing compile time serialization code, like serde does 
  • Moving computation to compile-time, thereby reducing runtime overhead
  • Writing...