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)

Traits and trait objects

Trait objects are another mechanism Rust has for storing a data value that might be one of several possible types into a single variable, but before we can talk about trait objects, we need to talk about traits.

Traits

A trait is a name and formal definition for a specific bit of functionality that a data type may provide. Previously, we've talked about how data types might have the Copy trait, and how, when they do, the compiler copies them instead of moving them. That is the general idea: when a trait is implemented for a data type, that data type gains the ability to interact with the rest of the program in some specific way.

Some of the built-in traits, such as Copy, actually affect how the...