Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By : Abhishek Chanda
Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By: Abhishek Chanda

Overview of this book

Rust is low-level enough to provide fine-grained control over memory while providing safety through compile-time validation. This makes it uniquely suitable for writing low-level networking applications. This book is divided into three main parts that will take you on an exciting journey of building a fully functional web server. The book starts with a solid introduction to Rust and essential networking concepts. This will lay a foundation for, and set the tone of, the entire book. In the second part, we will take an in-depth look at using Rust for networking software. From client-server networking using sockets to IPv4/v6, DNS, TCP, UDP, you will also learn about serializing and deserializing data using serde. The book shows how to communicate with REST servers over HTTP. The final part of the book discusses asynchronous network programming using the Tokio stack. Given the importance of security for modern systems, you will see how Rust supports common primitives such as TLS and public-key cryptography. After reading this book, you will be more than confident enough to use Rust to build effective networking software
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Introduction to Rust and its Ecosystem

The Rust programming language is sponsored by Mozilla and supported by a community of developers from across the globe. Rust is promoted as a systems programming language that supports automatic memory management without the overhead of a runtime or a garbage collector, concurrency without data races enforced by the compiler, and zero cost abstractions and generics. In subsequent sections, we will discuss these features in more detail. Rust is statically typed and borrows a number of functional programming ideas. A fascinating aspect of Rust is the use of the type system to guarantee memory safety without using a runtime. This makes Rust uniquely suitable for low-resource embedded devices and real-time systems, which require strong guarantees around code correctness. On the flip side, this often means that the compiler has to do a lot more...