Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming in Rust

By : Andrew Johnson
Book Image

Hands-On Functional Programming in Rust

By: Andrew Johnson

Overview of this book

Functional programming allows developers to divide programs into smaller, reusable components that ease the creation, testing, and maintenance of software as a whole. Combined with the power of Rust, you can develop robust and scalable applications that fulfill modern day software requirements. This book will help you discover all the Rust features that can be used to build software in a functional way. We begin with a brief comparison of the functional and object-oriented approach to different problems and patterns. We then quickly look at the patterns of control flow, data the abstractions of these unique to functional programming. The next part covers how to create functional apps in Rust; mutability and ownership, which are exclusive to Rust, are also discussed. Pure functions are examined next and you'll master closures, their various types, and currying. We also look at implementing concurrency through functional design principles and metaprogramming using macros. Finally, we look at best practices for debugging and optimization. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the functional approach of programming and will be able to use these techniques on a daily basis.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Using the lazy evaluation pattern

Lazy evaluation is procrastination, doing work later rather than now. Why is this important? Well, it turns out if you procrastinate long enough, sometimes it turns out that the work never needed to be done after all!

Take, for example, a simple expression evaluation:

fn main()
{
2 + 3;

|| 2 + 3;
}

In a strict interpretation, the first expression will perform an arithmetic calculation. The second expression will define an arithmetic calculation but will wait before evaluating it.

This case is so simple that the compiler gives a warning and might choose to discard the unused constant expression. In more complicated cases, the lazy evaluated case will always perform better when not evaluated. This should be expected because unused lazy expressions do nothing, intentionally.

Iterators are lazy. They don't do anything until you collect or otherwise...