Book Image

Mastering Rust - Second Edition

By : Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta

Book Image

Mastering Rust - Second Edition

By: Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta

Overview of this book

Rust is an empowering language that provides a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. Mastering Rust – Second Edition is filled with clear and simple explanations of the language features along with real-world examples, showing you how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. This second edition of the book improves upon the previous one and touches on all aspects that make Rust a great language. We have included the features from latest Rust 2018 edition such as the new module system, the smarter compiler, helpful error messages, and the stable procedural macros. You’ll learn how Rust can be used for systems programming, network programming, and even on the web. You’ll also learn techniques such as writing memory-safe code, building idiomatic Rust libraries, writing efficient asynchronous networking code, and advanced macros. The book contains a mix of theory and hands-on tasks so you acquire the skills as well as the knowledge, and it also provides exercises to hammer the concepts in. After reading this book, you will be able to implement Rust for your enterprise projects, write better tests and documentation, design for performance, and write idiomatic Rust code.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

Getting the most out of this book

Free Chapter

Getting Started with Rust

Getting Started with Rust

What is Rust and why should you care?

Installing the Rust compiler and toolchain

A tour of the language

Exercise – fixing the word counter

Managing Projects with Cargo

Managing Projects with Cargo

Package managers

Cargo and crates

Extending Cargo and tools

Setting up a Rust development environment

Building a project with Cargo – imgtool

Tests, Documentation, and Benchmarks

Tests, Documentation, and Benchmarks

Motivation for testing

Organizing tests

Integration tests

Writing and testing a crate – logic gate simulator

Continuous integration with Travis CI

Types, Generics, and Traits

Types, Generics, and Traits

Type systems and why they matter

Abstracting behavior with traits

Using traits with generics – trait bounds

Exploring standard library traits

True polymorphism using trait objects

Memory Management and Safety

Memory Management and Safety

Programs and memory

How do programs use memory?

Memory management and its kinds

Approaches to memory allocation

Memory management pitfalls

Trifecta of memory safety

Pointer types in Rust

Error Handling

Error handling prelude

Recoverable errors

Combinators on Option/Result

Early returns and the ? operator

Non-recoverable errors

Custom errors and the Error trait

Advanced Concepts

Advanced Concepts

Type system tidbits

Advanced traits

Closures in depth

Consts in structs, enums, and traits

Modules, paths, and imports

Advanced match patterns and guards

Casting and coercion

Types and memory

Serialization and deserialization using serde

Concurrency

Program execution models

Concurrency in Rust

Concurrency models with threads

thread-safety in Rust

Concurrency using the actor model

Metaprogramming with Macros

Metaprogramming with Macros

What is metaprogramming?

When to use and not use Rust macros

Macros in Rust and their types

Creating your first macro with macro_rules!

Built-in macros in the standard library

macro_rules! token types

Repetitions in macros

A more involved macro – writing a DSL for HashMap initialization

Macro use case – writing tests

Procedural macros

Debugging macros

Useful procedural macro crates

Unsafe Rust and Foreign Function Interfaces

Unsafe Rust and Foreign Function Interfaces

What is safe and unsafe really?

Calling C code from Rust

Calling Rust code from C

Using external C/C++ libraries from Rust

Creating native Python extensions with PyO3

Creating native extensions in Rust for Node.js

Logging

What is logging and why do we need it?

The need for logging frameworks

Logging frameworks and their key features

Approaches to logging

Logging in Rust

Network Programming in Rust

Network Programming in Rust

Network programming prelude

Synchronous network I/O

Asynchronous network I/O

Building Web Applications with Rust

Building Web Applications with Rust

Web applications in Rust

Typed HTTP with Hyper

Actix-web basics

Building a bookmarks API using Actix-web

Interacting with Databases in Rust

Interacting with Databases in Rust

Why do we need data persistence?

Connection pooling with r2d2

Postgres and the diesel ORM

Rust on the Web with WebAssembly

Rust on the Web with WebAssembly

What is WebAssembly?

Design goals of WebAssembly

Getting started with WebAssembly

Rust and WebAssembly

Building Desktop Applications with Rust

Building Desktop Applications with Rust

Introduction to GUI development

Building a hacker news app using gtk-rs

Other emerging GUI frameworks

Debugging

Introduction to debugging

RR debugger – a quick overview

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What is safe and unsafe really?

“You are allowed to do this, but you had better know what you are doing.”

- A Rustacean

When we talk about safety in programming languages, it is a property that spans different levels. A language can be memory-safe, type-safe, or it can be concurrent-safe. Memory safety means that a program doesn't write to a forbidden memory address and it doesn't access invalid memory. Type safety means that a program doesn't allow you to assign a number to a string variable and that this check happens at compile time, while concurrent-safe means that the program does not lead to race conditions when multiple threads are executing and modifying a shared state. If a language provides all of these levels of safety by itself, then it is said to be safe. To put it more generally, a program is deemed safe if, in all possible executions...