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

Summary


Rust provides us with convenient FFI abstractions to interface with different languages and has first-class support for C, as it exposes the C ABI (cdecl) for functions marked as extern. As such, it's a good candidate for bindings for a lot of C/C++ libraries. One of the prominent examples of this is the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine that's implemented in C++, which is used in the Servo project. The Servo engine calls into C++ using the bindings that are generated via the bindgen crate.

But, when we are interacting with cross-language boundaries, the language constructs and data representation that one language has don't need to match with the other language. As such, we need to put extra annotations, along with unsafe blocks, in Rust code to let the compiler know of our intent. We saw this when we used the #[repr(C)] attribute. The Foreign Function Interface (FFI), like many other Rust features, is zero-cost, which means that a minimal runtime cost is incurred when linking to code...