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)

Serialization and deserialization using Serde

Serde is the de-facto standard way of serializing and deserializing data in Rust. Serde supports a number of data structures that it can serialize out of the box to a number of given data formats (including JSON, and TOML, CSV). The easiest way to understand Serde is to think of it as an invertible function that transforms a given data structure into a stream of bytes. Other than standard data types, Serde also provides a few macros that can be implemented on user defined data types, making them (de)serializable.

In Chapter 2, Introduction to Rust and its Ecosystem, we discussed how procedural macros can be used to implement custom derives for given data types. Serde uses that mechanism to provide two custom derives, named Serialize and Deserialize, that can be implemented for user-defined data types that are composed of data types...