Book Image

Rust Quick Start Guide

By : Daniel Arbuckle
Book Image

Rust Quick Start Guide

By: Daniel Arbuckle

Overview of this book

Rust is an emerging programming language applicable to areas such as embedded programming, network programming, system programming, and web development. This book will take you from the basics of Rust to a point where your code compiles and does what you intend it to do! This book starts with an introduction to Rust and how to get set for programming, including the rustup and cargo tools for managing a Rust installation and development work?ow. Then you'll learn about the fundamentals of structuring a Rust program, such as functions, mutability, data structures, implementing behavior for types, and many more. You will also learn about concepts that Rust handles differently from most other languages. After understanding the Basics of Rust programming, you will learn about the core ideas, such as variable ownership, scope, lifetime, and borrowing. After these key ideas, you will explore making decisions in Rust based on data types by learning about match and if let expressions. After that, you'll work with different data types in Rust, and learn about memory management and smart pointers.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Transferring ownership

It's possible (and common) to transfer ownership of a value to a different scope. For example, we can do something like this:

{
let main_1 = Point2D {x: 10.0, y: 10.0};
receive_ownership(main_1);
receive_ownership(main_1); // This will cause a compiler error!
}

What is happening is that the main_1 variable is created and initialized under the ownership of the current scope (the value is pushed onto the stack), but then the ownership is transferred to the scope of the block expression that makes up the receive_ownership function's body, when the value is used as a function parameter. The compiler knows that the current scope is no longer responsible for cleaning up the value stored in main_1, because that job now belongs to a different scope.

The bytes that represent the value on the stack are copied to a new location on the stack, within...