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

Reasons to use relm instead of gtk-rs directly


As you have seen in the previous chapters, we used concepts that were not really obvious, and doing certain things that would normally be easy to do aren't that easy when using GTK+ with Rust. These are some of the many reasons to use relm.

State mutation

It might not be clear from the previous chapter, but we indirectly used Rc<RefCell<T>> to do state mutation. Indeed, our Playlist type contains a RefCell<Option<String>> and we wrapped our Playlist inside a reference-counted pointer. This was to be able to mutate the state in reaction to events, for instance playing the song when clicking the play button:

let playlist = self.playlist.clone();
let play_image = self.toolbar.play_image.clone();
let cover = self.cover.clone();
let state = self.state.clone();
self.toolbar.play_button.connect_clicked(move |_| {
    if state.lock().unwrap().stopped {
        if playlist.play() {
            set_image_icon(&play_image, PAUSE_ICON...