Book Image

Rust High Performance

By : Iban Eguia Moraza
Book Image

Rust High Performance

By: Iban Eguia Moraza

Overview of this book

This book teaches you how to optimize the performance of your Rust code so that it is at the same level as languages such as C/C++. You'll understand and fi x common pitfalls, learn how to improve your productivity by using metaprogramming, and speed up your code. You will master the features of the language, which will make you stand out, and use them to greatly improve the efficiency of your algorithms. The book begins with an introduction to help you identify bottlenecks when programming in Rust. We highlight common performance pitfalls, along with strategies to detect and resolve these issues early. We move on to mastering Rust's type system, which will enable us to optimize both performance and safety at compile time. You will learn how to effectively manage memory in Rust, mastering the borrow checker. We move on to measuring performance and you will see how this affects the way you write code. Moving forward, you will perform metaprogramming in Rust to boost the performance of your code and your productivity. Finally, you will learn parallel programming in Rust, which enables efficient and faster execution by using multithreading and asynchronous programming.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Mastering the borrow checker


To ensure memory and thread safety, Rust's borrow checker has three simple rules. They are enforced all through the code except in unsafe scopes. Here they are:

  • Each binding will have an owner
  • There can only be one owner for a binding
  • When the owner goes out of the scope, the binding gets dropped

These three rules seem simple enough, but they have a great implication on how we code. The compiler can know beforehand when an owner goes out of scope, so it will always know when to drop/destruct a binding/variable. This means that you can write your code without having to think about where you create variables, where you call destructors, or whether you have already called a destructor or you are calling it twice.

Of course, this comes with an additional learning curve that can sometimes be difficult to catch up. The second rule is what most people find difficult to manage. Since there can only be one owner at a time, sharing information sometimes becomes somewhat difficult...