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)

Comments


Ideally, a program should be self-documenting by using descriptive variable names and easy-to-read code, but there are always cases where additional comments about a program's structure or algorithms are needed. Rust follows the C convention and has:

  • // line comments; everything on the line after // is commentary and not compiled
  • /* */block or multi-line comments; everything between the start /*and the end */ is not compiled

However, the preferred Rust style is to use only the // comment, also for multiple lines, as shown in the following code:

// see Chapter 2/code/comments.rs 
fn main() { 
  // Here starts the execution of the Game. 
  // We begin with printing a welcome message: 
  println!("Welcome to the Game!"); 
} 

Use the /* */ comments only to comment out code.

Rust also has a doc comment with ///, useful in larger projects that require an official documentation for customers and developers. Such comments have to appear before an item (like a function) on a separate line to document...