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)

Traits


What if our game is really diversely populated, and besides Aliens we have also Zombies and Predators, and, needless to say, they all want to attack. Can we abstract their common behavior into something they all share? Of course, in Rust we say that they have a trait in common, analogous to an interface or superclass in other languages. Let's call that trait Monster, and because they all want to attack, a first version could be:

// see code in Chapter 6/code/traits.rs 
trait Monster { 
    fn attack(&self); 
} 

A trait mostly contains a description of methods, that is, their type declarations or signatures, but no real implementation (as we will see later in the example, a trait can contain a default implementation of a method). This is logical, because Zombies, Predators, and Aliens could each have their own method of attack. So there is no code body between {} after the function signature, but don't forget the ;(semicolon) to close it off.

When we want to implement the Monster...