Book Image

Rust High Performance

By : Iban Eguia Moraza
Book Image

Rust High Performance

By: Iban Eguia Moraza

Overview of this book

This book teaches you how to optimize the performance of your Rust code so that it is at the same level as languages such as C/C++. You'll understand and fi x common pitfalls, learn how to improve your productivity by using metaprogramming, and speed up your code. You will master the features of the language, which will make you stand out, and use them to greatly improve the efficiency of your algorithms. The book begins with an introduction to help you identify bottlenecks when programming in Rust. We highlight common performance pitfalls, along with strategies to detect and resolve these issues early. We move on to mastering Rust's type system, which will enable us to optimize both performance and safety at compile time. You will learn how to effectively manage memory in Rust, mastering the borrow checker. We move on to measuring performance and you will see how this affects the way you write code. Moving forward, you will perform metaprogramming in Rust to boost the performance of your code and your productivity. Finally, you will learn parallel programming in Rust, which enables efficient and faster execution by using multithreading and asynchronous programming.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Metaprogramming in nightly Rust


Until now, we have stayed in stable Rust, since it allows forward compatibility. There are some nightly features, though, that can help us improve our control over the code we generate. Nevertheless, all of them are experimental and they might change or even get removed before being stabilized.

Therefore, you should take into account that using nightly features will probably break your code in the future and it will take more effort to maintain it to be compatible with new Rust versions. Nevertheless, we will have a quick look at two new features that are coming to Rust.

Understanding compiler plugins

The Rust nightly compiler accepts loading extensions, called plugins. They effectively change the way the compiler behaves, so they can modify the language itself. A plugin is a crate, similar to the procedural macro crate we created previously.

The difference between a procedural or standard macro and a plugin is that, while the first two modify the Rust code they...