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)

Getting input from the console


Suppose we want to capture the nickname of our player(s) before starting the game, how would we do that? Input or output functionality is handled by the module io in the crate std. It has a function stdin() to read input from the console. This function returns an object of type Stdin, which is a handle to the input stream. The object Stdin has a method read_line(buf) to read a full line of input, that ends with a new line character (that is, when the user hits Enter). This input is read into a String buffer buf. A method is a name for a function defined for a certain type, and it is called using dot notation, like object.method (see Chapter 6, ;Using Traits and OOP in Rust).

So our code will look like this:

let mut buf = String::new(); 
io::stdin().read_line(&mut buf); 

But that is not good enough for Rust, it gives us the following warning:

warning: unused result which must be used

Rust is foremost a safe language and we must be ready to cope with everything...