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

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed embedding languages in Rust and vice versa. Rust is an incredibly useful programming language in its own right, but has been designed with care to interoperate with the existing language ecosystem. Delegating difficult concurrency work in a memory-unsafe environment into Rust is a powerful model. Mozilla's work on Firefox has shown that path to be fruitful. Likewise, there are decades' worth of well-tested libraries niche domains—weather modeling, physics, amusing programming games from the 1980s—that could, theoretically, be rewritten in Rust but are probably better incorporated behind safe interfaces.

This chapter is the last that aims to teach you a new, broad skill. If you've made it this far in the book, thank you. It's been a real pleasure writing for you. You should, hopefully, now have a solid foundation for doing low-level concurrency in Rust and the confidence to read through most Rust codebases you come across. There's a lot going on in Rust...