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.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

True polymorphism using trait objects

Rust allows a true form of polymorphism through special forms of types implementing a trait. These are known as trait objects. Before we explain how Rust achieves polymorphism using trait objects, we need to understand the idea of dispatch.

Dispatch

Dispatch is a concept that emerged from the object-oriented programming paradigm, mainly in the context of one of its features called polymorphism. In the context of OOP, when APIs are generic or take parameters implementing an interface, it here has to figure out what method implementation to invoke on an instance of a type that's passed to the API. This process of method resolution in a polymorphic context is called dispatch, and invoking...