Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

By : Claus Matzinger
Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

By: Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust has come a long way and is now utilized in several contexts. Its key strengths are its software infrastructure and resource-constrained applications, including desktop applications, servers, and performance-critical applications, not forgetting its importance in systems' programming. This book will be your guide as it takes you through implementing classic data structures and algorithms in Rust, helping you to get up and running as a confident Rust programmer. The book begins with an introduction to Rust data structures and algorithms, while also covering essential language constructs. You will learn how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You will also learn how to implement sorting and searching algorithms. You will learn how to attain high performance by implementing algorithms to string data types and implement hash structures in algorithm design. The book will examine algorithm analysis, including Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Divide and Conquer algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

The Rust standard library features a great collections part, providing a few highly optimized implementations of basic data structures.

We started with Vec<T> and VecDeque<T>, both based on a heap-allocated array and wrapped in the RawVec<T> structure. They show excellent performance while memory efficiency remains high, thanks to the array base and unsafe operations based on pointers.

LinkedList<T> is a doubly-linked list that performs really well, thanks to direct data manipulation and the lack of runtime checking. While it excels at splitting and merging, most other operations are slower than Vec<T> and it lacks some useful features.

HashSet and HashMap are based on the same implementation (HashMap) and—unless specified differently—use DefaultHasher to generate a hashed key of an object. This key is stored (and later retrieved...