Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming in Rust

By : Andrew Johnson
Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming in Rust

By: Andrew Johnson

Overview of this book

Functional programming allows developers to divide programs into smaller, reusable components that ease the creation, testing, and maintenance of software as a whole. Combined with the power of Rust, you can develop robust and scalable applications that fulfill modern day software requirements. This book will help you discover all the Rust features that can be used to build software in a functional way. We begin with a brief comparison of the functional and object-oriented approach to different problems and patterns. We then quickly look at the patterns of control flow, data the abstractions of these unique to functional programming. The next part covers how to create functional apps in Rust; mutability and ownership, which are exclusive to Rust, are also discussed. Pure functions are examined next and you'll master closures, their various types, and currying. We also look at implementing concurrency through functional design principles and metaprogramming using macros. Finally, we look at best practices for debugging and optimization. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the functional approach of programming and will be able to use these techniques on a daily basis.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced many common functional design patterns. We used a lot of scary words, such as functor, monad, and combinator. You should try to remember these words and their meanings. Other scary words, such as contravariant, you can probably forget unless you want to pursue math.

In an applied context, we learned that functors can hide information to expose simple transformations on data. The monad pattern allows us to turn sequential actions into units of computation. Monads can be used to create iterators that also behave more like lists. Laziness can be used to defer computation. Also, these patterns can often be combined in useful ways, such as FRP, which is gaining popularity as a tool to develop user interfaces and other complex interactive programs.

In the next chapter, we will explore concurrency. We will introduce the Rust concepts of thread/data...