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)

Generic types on functions outside of implementation blocks

It's possible to use generic type parameters for functions even when they're not part of an implementation block. That looks like this:

fn print_generic<T>(value: T) where T: Display {
println!("{}", value);
}

This function has a generic type parameter, T, which can be any data type that has the Display trait. That means that, if this function is defined, we can do things like this:

print_generic(12.7);
print_generic("Hello");
print_generic(75);

Each of those lines calls a different print_generic function, specialized for the data type of the parameter. The compiler generates code for each version of print_generic that we use, each one accepting a different data type for its parameter.

Of course, print_generic doesn't do anything that the plain println! macro doesn't, but...