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)

The macro system

Rust supports a macro system that has evolved quite a lot over the years. A distinctive feature of Rust macros are that they are guaranteed to not refer to identifiers outside their scope by accident, and so the macro implementation in Rust is hygienic. As one would expect, Rust macros are expanded to source code ahead of the compilation in place, and are compiled with the translation unit. The compiler enforces scoping rules on expanded macros to make them hygienic. Rust macros differ from other constructs in that they always end in an exclamation mark !.

Modern Rust has two ways of working with macros; the older, syntactic macro way, and the newer, procedural macro way. Let's look at each of these:

Syntactic macros

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