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)

Inlining assembly code


In Rust, we can embed assembly code. This should be extremely rare, but one can imagine situations where this might be useful, for example, when you require utmost performance or very low-level control. But of course, the portability of your code and perhaps its stability decrease when doing this. The Rust compiler will probably generate better assembly code than you would write, so it isn't worth the effort most of the time.

The mechanism works by using the asm! macro, as in this example, where we calculate a - b in the subtract function by calling the assembly code:

// code from Chapter 10/code/asm.rs: 
#![feature(asm)] 
 
fn subtract(a: i32, b: i32) -> i32 { 
    let sub: i32; 
    unsafe { 
        asm!("sub $2, $1; mov $1, $0" : "=r"(sub) : "r"(a), "r"(b) 
); 
    } 
    sub 
} 
 
fn main() { 
    println!("{}", subtract(42, 7))  

This prints out the result 35.

asm! can only be used with the feature gate #![feature(asm)].

asm! has a number of parameters separated...