Book Image

Rust Essentials - Second Edition

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Rust Essentials - Second Edition

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

Rust is the new, open source, fast, and safe systems programming language for the 21st century, developed at Mozilla Research, and with a steadily growing community. It was created to solve the dilemma between high-level, slow code with minimal control over the system, and low-level, fast code with maximum system control. It is no longer necessary to learn C/C++ to develop resource intensive and low-level systems applications. This book will give you a head start to solve systems programming and application tasks with Rust. We start off with an argumentation of Rust's unique place in today's landscape of programming languages. You'll install Rust and learn how to work with its package manager Cargo. The various concepts are introduced step by step: variables, types, functions, and control structures to lay the groundwork. Then we explore more structured data such as strings, arrays, and enums, and you’ll see how pattern matching works. Throughout all this, we stress the unique ways of reasoning that the Rust compiler uses to produce safe code. Next we look at Rust's specific way of error handling, and the overall importance of traits in Rust code. The pillar of memory safety is treated in depth as we explore the various pointer kinds. Next, you’ll see how macros can simplify code generation, and how to compose bigger projects with modules and crates. Finally, you’ll discover how we can write safe concurrent code in Rust and interface with C programs, get a view of the Rust ecosystem, and explore the use of the standard library.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Interfacing with C


Because of the vast functionality that exists in C code, it can sometimes be useful to delegate processing to a C routine, instead of writing everything in Rust.

You can call all functions and types from the C standard library by using the libc crate, which must be obtained through Cargo.

You have to add the following to Cargo.toml:

 [dependencies] 
    libc = "*" 

If you use Rust's nightly version, this is not necessary, but you have to use a feature attribute (or a feature gate, as they are also called) at the start of your code:

    #![feature(libc)]

Note

Feature gates are common in Rust to enable the use of a certain functionality, but they are not available in stable Rust, only in the current development branch (nightly release).

If you have both the stable and nightly versions installed, you can easily switch between them using the commands rustup default nightly and rustup default stable.

Then, simply add the following to your Rust code:

extern crate libc; 

To import C functions...