Book Image

Rust Programming By Example

By : Guillaume Gomez, Antoni Boucher
Book Image

Rust Programming By Example

By: Guillaume Gomez, Antoni Boucher

Overview of this book

Rust is an open source, safe, concurrent, practical language created by Mozilla. It runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees safety. This book gets you started with essential software development by guiding you through the different aspects of Rust programming. With this approach, you can bridge the gap between learning and implementing immediately. Beginning with an introduction to Rust, you’ll learn the basic aspects such as its syntax, data types, functions, generics, control flows, and more. After this, you’ll jump straight into building your first project, a Tetris game. Next you’ll build a graphical music player and work with fast, reliable networking software using Tokio, the scalable and productive asynchronous IO Rust library. Over the course of this book, you’ll explore various features of Rust Programming including its SDL features, event loop, File I/O, and the famous GTK+ widget toolkit. Through these projects, you’ll see how well Rust performs in terms of concurrency—including parallelism, reliability, improved performance, generics, macros, and thread safety. We’ll also cover some asynchronous and reactive programming aspects of Rust. By the end of the book, you’ll be comfortable building various real-world applications in Rust.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
3
Events and Basic Game Mechanisms
Index

Pausing and resuming the song


We'll start by adding a field indicating whether the player is in pause or not. This field will be changed by methods such as play or resume. However, remember that our Playlist is wrapped in an Rc, so that we can use it in different places, namely in the event handlers. Also, remember that Rust forbids mutation when there are mutable references to a value. How can we update this field while still using a reference-counted pointer? One way is to use interior mutability.

Interior mutability

Interior mutability is a concept granting mutable an inner value of a type with an immutable reference. Is this safe to do? Yes, totally, because we need to respect certain constraints. One way to have interior mutability is to wrap our Cell type. The constraint of this type is that if we want to get the value from the Cell from an immutable reference, the wrapped type must implement the Copy trait. We'll see the other commonly-used type for interior mutability later in this...