Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By : Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger
Book Image

The Complete Rust Programming Reference Guide

By: Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta, Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust is a powerful language with a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. This Learning Path is filled with clear and simple explanations of its features along with real-world examples, demonstrating how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. You’ll get started with an introduction to Rust data structures, algorithms, and essential language constructs. Next, you will understand how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You’ll also learn to implement sorting and searching algorithms, such as Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. As you progress, you’ll pick up on using Rust for systems programming, network programming, and the web. You’ll then move on to discover a variety of techniques, right from writing memory-safe code, to building idiomatic Rust libraries, and even advanced macros. By the end of this Learning Path, you’ll be able to implement Rust for enterprise projects, writing better tests and documentation, designing for performance, and creating idiomatic Rust code. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Mastering Rust - Second Edition by Rahul Sharma and Vesa Kaihlavirta • Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust by Claus Matzinger
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Unsafe Rust and Foreign Function Interfaces

Rust is a language that has two modes: safe mode (the default) and unsafe mode. In safe mode, you get all sorts of safety features to protect you from serious mistakes, but there are times when you're required to shake off the safety harness provided by the compiler and get that extra level of control. One use case is interfacing with other languages, such as C, which can be very unsafe. In this chapter, you will get to know what sort of extra work is required when Rust has to interact with other languages and how unsafe mode is used to facilitate and make this interaction explicit.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding the safe and unsafe modes
  • Operations that are unsafe in Rust
  • Foreign function interface, talking to C, and vice versa
  • Interfacing with Python using PyO3
  • Interfacing with Node.js using Neon