Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By : Abhishek Chanda
Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By: Abhishek Chanda

Overview of this book

Rust is low-level enough to provide fine-grained control over memory while providing safety through compile-time validation. This makes it uniquely suitable for writing low-level networking applications. This book is divided into three main parts that will take you on an exciting journey of building a fully functional web server. The book starts with a solid introduction to Rust and essential networking concepts. This will lay a foundation for, and set the tone of, the entire book. In the second part, we will take an in-depth look at using Rust for networking software. From client-server networking using sockets to IPv4/v6, DNS, TCP, UDP, you will also learn about serializing and deserializing data using serde. The book shows how to communicate with REST servers over HTTP. The final part of the book discusses asynchronous network programming using the Tokio stack. Given the importance of security for modern systems, you will see how Rust supports common primitives such as TLS and public-key cryptography. After reading this book, you will be more than confident enough to use Rust to build effective networking software
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

TCP and UDP Using Rust

Being a system programming language, the Rust Standard Library has support for interacting with the network stack. All the networking-related functionality is located in the std::net namespace; reading and writing to sockets also uses Read and Write traits from std::io. Some of the most important structures here are IpAddr, which represents a generic IP address that can either be v4 or v6, SocketAddr, which represents a generic socket address (a combination of an IP and a port on a host), TcpListener and TcpStream for communicating over TCP, UdpSocket for UDP, and more. Currently, the standard library does not provide any APIs to deal with the network stack at a lower level. While this might change in the future, a number of crates fill that gap. The most important of these is libpnet, which provides a set of APIs for lower-level networking.

Some other important...