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)

Parsing textual data

Data parsing is a problem closely related to that of deserialization. The most common way of thinking about parsing is to start with a formal grammar and construct parsers based on that. This results in a bottom-up parser where smaller rules parse smaller components of the whole input. A final combinatorial rule combines all smaller rules in a given order to form the final parser. This way of formally defining a finite set of rules is called a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG). This ensures that parsing is unambiguous; that there is only one valid parse tree if parsing succeeds. In the Rust ecosystem, there are a few distinct ways of implementing PEGs, and each of those have their own strengths and weaknesses. The first way is using macros to define a domain-specific language for parsing.

This method integrates well with the compiler through the new macro system...