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)

Data Serialization, Deserialization, and Parsing

In the previous chapter, we covered writing simple socket servers in Rust. Transport protocols such as TCP and UDP only provide mechanisms to transport messages, so it is up to a higher-level protocol to actually craft and send those messages. Also, TCP and UDP protocols always deal with bytes; we saw this when we called as_bytes on our strings before sending those out on the socket. This process of converting a piece of data into a format that can be stored or transmitted (a stream of bytes in the case of networking) is called serialization. The reverse process is deserialization, which turns a raw data format into a data structure. Any networking software must deal with serializing and deserializing data that has been received, or is about to be sent out. This simple conversion is not always possible for more complex types such...