Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By : Brian L. Troutwine
Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By: Brian L. Troutwine

Overview of this book

Most programming languages can really complicate things, especially with regard to unsafe memory access. The burden on you, the programmer, lies across two domains: understanding the modern machine and your language's pain-points. This book will teach you to how to manage program performance on modern machines and build fast, memory-safe, and concurrent software in Rust. It starts with the fundamentals of Rust and discusses machine architecture concepts. You will be taken through ways to measure and improve the performance of Rust code systematically and how to write collections with confidence. You will learn about the Sync and Send traits applied to threads, and coordinate thread execution with locks, atomic primitives, data-parallelism, and more. The book will show you how to efficiently embed Rust in C++ code and explore the functionalities of various crates for multithreaded applications. It explores implementations in depth. You will know how a mutex works and build several yourself. You will master radically different approaches that exist in the ecosystem for structuring and managing high-scale systems. By the end of the book, you will feel comfortable with designing safe, consistent, parallel, and high-performance applications in Rust.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Interesting projects


There are many interesting projects in the Rust community right now. In this section, I'd like to look at two that I didn't get a chance to discuss at length in the book.

Fuzzing

In previous chapters we've used AFL to validate that our programs did not exhibit crashing behavior. While AFL is very commonly used, it's not the only fuzzer available for Rust. LLVM has a native library—libfuzzer (https://llvm.org/docs/LibFuzzer.html)—covering the same space, and the cargo-fuzz (https://crates.io/crates/cargo-fuzz) project acts as an executor. You might also be interested in honggfuzz-rs (https://crates.io/crates/honggfuzz), a fuzzer developed at Google for searching out security related violations. It is natively multithreaded—there is no need to spin up multiple processes manually—and can do network fuzzing. My preference, traditionally, has been to fuzz with AFL. The honggfuzz project has real momentum, and readers should give it a try in their own projects.

Seer, a symbolic...