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)

Comparison of these techniques

The Rust community tends to prefer using enumerations to address one-variable-multiple-types problems. In terms of runtime cost, a simple enumeration is maximally efficient, and efficiency is important to Rust programmers.

However, there is a downside to using enumerations, which is that the match expressions (or similar) that decide how to handle a particular enumeration value and associated data might be spread throughout the source code of the program. If we discover a need to add or remove an enumeration value, or change an enumeration value's parameters, we have to find and change every one of those match expressions.

If we decide to add a Reverse value to the Drive enumeration, the match expressions have to be changed:

The compiler will point out each match expression that needs to be updated, but it won't catch places where an if...