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)

Functional features in Rust

Rust has been inspired by functional languages such as Haskell and OCaml. Unsurprisingly, Rust has rich support for functional programming both in the language and in the standard library. In this section, we will look at some of these.

Higher-order functions

We have seen previously how Rust functions define an isolated scope in which all local variables live. Thus, variables outside the scope can never leak into it unless they are explicitly passed as arguments. There can be cases where this is not the desired behavior; closures provide an anonymous function like mechanism, which has access to all the resources defined in the scope in which it is defined. This enables the compiler to enforce the...