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)

Macros in Rust and their types

Rust macros do their magic of code generation before the program compiles to a binary object file. They take input, known as token trees, and are expanded at the end of the second pass of parsing during Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) construction. These are pieces of jargon from the compiler world and need some explanation, so let's do that. To understand how macros work, we need to be familiar with how source code is processed by the compiler to understand a program. This will help us in understanding how a macro processes its input and the error messages they emit when we use them incorrectly. We'll only cover parts that are relevant to our understanding of macros.

First, the compiler reads the source code byte by byte and groups characters into meaningful chunks, which are called tokens. This is done by a component of the compiler that&apos...