Book Image

Rust Programming By Example

By : Guillaume Gomez, Antoni Boucher
Book Image

Rust Programming By Example

By: Guillaume Gomez, Antoni Boucher

Overview of this book

Rust is an open source, safe, concurrent, practical language created by Mozilla. It runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees safety. This book gets you started with essential software development by guiding you through the different aspects of Rust programming. With this approach, you can bridge the gap between learning and implementing immediately. Beginning with an introduction to Rust, you’ll learn the basic aspects such as its syntax, data types, functions, generics, control flows, and more. After this, you’ll jump straight into building your first project, a Tetris game. Next you’ll build a graphical music player and work with fast, reliable networking software using Tokio, the scalable and productive asynchronous IO Rust library. Over the course of this book, you’ll explore various features of Rust Programming including its SDL features, event loop, File I/O, and the famous GTK+ widget toolkit. Through these projects, you’ll see how well Rust performs in terms of concurrency—including parallelism, reliability, improved performance, generics, macros, and thread safety. We’ll also cover some asynchronous and reactive programming aspects of Rust. By the end of the book, you’ll be comfortable building various real-world applications in Rust.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
3
Events and Basic Game Mechanisms
Index

Opening MP3 files


Let's finish this chapter by adding the ability to open MP3 files and show their metadata in the playlist widget we just created.

First of all, we'll remove this line:

cover.set_from_file("cover.jpg");

This is because the image will be set from the data of the MP3 files we play.

We'll use a new crate, so add this line in the [dependencies] section of your Cargo.toml:

gtk-sys = "^0.5.0"

Also, add the following line to your main.rs:

extern crate gtk_sys;

The *-sys crates of the gtk-rs ecosystem are low-level crates, the ones that directly bind to the GTK+ C library. Since they're very low-level and require the use of unsafe code, wrappers have been made; these are crates without the -sys suffix, such as gtk and gdk.

Reference-counting pointer

We'll also change some code before we continue. Since we'll want to share our Playlist widget with different parts of our code, including some event handlers, we need a way of sharing a reference that will last long enough (remember the issue...