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

Type system tidbits


"An algorithm must be seen to be believed"

Donald Knuth

Before we go into more dense topics in this chapter, we'll first discuss some of the type system tidbits in statically typed programming languages in general, with focus on Rust. Some of these topics may already be familiar to you from Chapter 1, Getting Started with Rust, but we're going to dig into the details here.

Blocks and expressions

Despite being a mix of statements and expressions, Rust is primarily an expression-oriented language. This means that most constructs are expressions that return a value. It's also a language that uses C-like braces {}, to introduce new scope for variables in a program. Let's get these concepts straight before we talk more about them later in this chapter.

A block expression (hereby referred as blocks) is any item that starts with { and ends with }. In Rust, they include if else expressions, match expressions, while loops, loops, bare {} blocks, functions, methods, and closures,...