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)

Heap Memory and Smart Pointers

We've talked about the stack, and how it is the place where Rust stores data and keeps track of what needs to be kept around and what needs to be cleaned up. It's a powerful, useful mechanism, but it's not right for everything.

Imagine we have a variable that contains an image. It takes up several megabytes of memory, and we need to transfer ownership of it between various parts of our program at different times. If we just put it on the stack, and allow Rust to move it into new scopes as needed, everything will work, but it will be slowed down by the need to copy those megabytes of data every time it moves the value to a new owner.

That's not the only scenario where storing information on the stack isn't ideal, but it's a good illustration.

On the other hand, the last thing we want to do is to break the stack and scope...