Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By : Brian L. Troutwine
Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By: Brian L. Troutwine

Overview of this book

Most programming languages can really complicate things, especially with regard to unsafe memory access. The burden on you, the programmer, lies across two domains: understanding the modern machine and your language's pain-points. This book will teach you to how to manage program performance on modern machines and build fast, memory-safe, and concurrent software in Rust. It starts with the fundamentals of Rust and discusses machine architecture concepts. You will be taken through ways to measure and improve the performance of Rust code systematically and how to write collections with confidence. You will learn about the Sync and Send traits applied to threads, and coordinate thread execution with locks, atomic primitives, data-parallelism, and more. The book will show you how to efficiently embed Rust in C++ code and explore the functionalities of various crates for multithreaded applications. It explores implementations in depth. You will know how a mutex works and build several yourself. You will master radically different approaches that exist in the ecosystem for structuring and managing high-scale systems. By the end of the book, you will feel comfortable with designing safe, consistent, parallel, and high-performance applications in Rust.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Preliminaries – Machine Architecture and Getting Started with Rust

In this chapter, we'll work through the preliminaries of the book, making sure to cover the basics necessary to frame the remainder of the book. This book is about parallel programming in the Rust programing language. It's essential, then, to understand modern computing hardware at a high level. We'll need a sense of how a modern CPU operates, how memory buses influence the CPU's ability to perform work and what it means for a computer to be able to do multiple things at once. In addition, we'll discuss validating your Rust installation, and cover generating executables for the two CPU architectures that this book will be concerned with. 

By the close of this chapter, we will have:

  • Discussed a high-level model of CPU operations
  • Discussed a high-level model of computer memory
  • Had a preliminary discussion of the Rust memory model
  • Investigated generating runnable Rust programs for x86 and ARM 
  • Investigated debugging these programs