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)

Looking into the Future

The backbone of Rust's asynchronous programming story is the futures crate. This crate provides a construct called a future. This is essentially a placeholder for the result of an operation. As you would expect, the result of an operation can be in one of two states—either the operation is still in progress and the result is not available yet, or the operation has finished and the result is available. Note that in the second case, there might have been an error, making the result immaterial.

The library provides a trait called Future (among other things),which any type can implement to be able to act like a future. This is how the trait looks:

trait Future {
type Item;
type Error;
fn poll(&mut self) -> Poll<Self::Item, Self::Error>;
...
}

Here, Item refers to the type of the returned result on successful completion of...