Book Image

Rust Essentials - Second Edition

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Rust Essentials - Second Edition

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

Rust is the new, open source, fast, and safe systems programming language for the 21st century, developed at Mozilla Research, and with a steadily growing community. It was created to solve the dilemma between high-level, slow code with minimal control over the system, and low-level, fast code with maximum system control. It is no longer necessary to learn C/C++ to develop resource intensive and low-level systems applications. This book will give you a head start to solve systems programming and application tasks with Rust. We start off with an argumentation of Rust's unique place in today's landscape of programming languages. You'll install Rust and learn how to work with its package manager Cargo. The various concepts are introduced step by step: variables, types, functions, and control structures to lay the groundwork. Then we explore more structured data such as strings, arrays, and enums, and you’ll see how pattern matching works. Throughout all this, we stress the unique ways of reasoning that the Rust compiler uses to produce safe code. Next we look at Rust's specific way of error handling, and the overall importance of traits in Rust code. The pillar of memory safety is treated in depth as we explore the various pointer kinds. Next, you’ll see how macros can simplify code generation, and how to compose bigger projects with modules and crates. Finally, you’ll discover how we can write safe concurrent code in Rust and interface with C programs, get a view of the Rust ecosystem, and explore the use of the standard library.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Generic data structures and functions


Genericity is the capacity to write code once, with types not or partly specified, so that the code can be used for many different types. Rust has this capacity in abundance, applying it for both data structures and functions.

A composite data structure is generic if the type of its items can be of a general type <T>. The type T can for example be an i32 value, an f64, a String, but also a struct type like Person that we have coded ourselves. So, we can have a vector Vec<f64>, but also a vector Vec<Person>. If you make T a concrete type, then you must substitute the type T with that type everywhere T appears in the definition of the data structure.

Our data structure can be parametrized with a generic type <T>, and so has multiple concrete definitions--it is polymorphic. Rust makes extensive use of this concept, which we encountered already in Chapter 4, Structuring Data and Matching Patterns when we talked about arrays, vectors...