Welcome to Rust High Performance. In this book, you will get a gentle introduction to high-performance programming by learning how to improve the performance of your Rust code. It will show you how to translate your code from other languages properly by avoiding common bottlenecks, and it will show you how to easily increase the performance of your application using some idiomatic Rust APIs.
You will learn about the great Rust community by finding great crates that will increase the development efficiency while also improving the performance of your application, and you will write examples to use all your knowledge. You will write your own macros and custom derives, and you will learn about asynchronous and multithreaded programming.
In this book, you will find everything you need to improve the performance of your Rust code; you will learn many tricks and use helpful crates and tools. Therefore, the book is written from the basis that you already have some knowledge of programming in Rust.
This book will not cover the whole world of high-performance programming since it's an incredibly wide topic. You will find a gentle introduction to most of the generic high-performance programming concepts and learn how specific patterns can be used in the Rust programming language.
Chapter 1, Common Performance Pitfalls, helps you learn why translating from languages such as C/C++ can lead to big performance decline, how to improve your algorithms using different Copy/Clone types and references, and understand how cyclomatic complexity can make compiler optimizations less effective.
Chapter 2, Extra Performance Enhancements, takes a step forward to understand some tips and tricks Rust gives us to improve the performance of your applications. After learning about common mistakes in the previous chapters, you will learn how to use the Rust type system to your advantage, creating complex compile-time checks and evaluations. You will also understand the difference between the common standard library collections so that you can choose the right one for your algorithm.
Chapter 3, Memory Management in Rust, shows you how to improve the memory footprint of your applications by taking advantage of the borrow checker. You will learn about lifetimes and how to properly use them, understand the different representation attributes that will help your data be properly structured in memory, and finally, learn how to create efficient shared pointer structures for your application using standard library types.
Chapter 4, Lints and Clippy, teaches you the power of lints and how to configure them to give you proper suggestions. You'll learn how to configure clippy, an incredibly powerful tool that will point out common errors and potential performance improvements. In this chapter, you will learn the most important clippy lints and use them in your development workflow.
Chapter 5, Profiling Your Rust Application, covers how to use profiling software so that you can easily find performance bottlenecks in your applications. You'll learn how cache misses impact your code and how to find where in the code is the application spending more time. You will learn to fix those bottlenecks and therefore improve the overall performance of the application.
Chapter 6, Benchmarking, discusses how to detect performance critical code and how to benchmark it in both Rust stable and nightly. You will also learn how to set up your continuous integration environment to get performance reports and track them during the development process of your project.
Chapter 7, Built-in Macros and Configuration Items, brings you to the world of attributes that can personalize your code so that you target specific platforms with each section of your code using all of each platform's potential. You will understand how to divide your crate so that not all the code has to be compiled for each use, and you will finally learn how to use nightly features to improve the efficiency of your code and the amount of code to write.
Chapter 8, Must-Have Macro Crates, introduces you to multiple metaprogramming crates—create serializable structures, deserialize data from languages such as JSON or TOML, parse log files, or create a lot of boilerplate code for your data structures. Here, you can understand how to initialize complex static structures and use a proper error handling. Finally, thanks to nightly Rust and plugins, you will be able to create a small web server with a database and even attach to it the fastest template system in existence.
Chapter 9, Creating Your Own Macros, covers how to write your own macros to avoid code boilerplate. You will understand how the new macros 1.1 work and create your first custom derive. Finally, you will learn how compiler plugins internally work and will create your own compiler plugin.
Chapter 10, Multithreading, outlines how to create multiple threads to balance the work of your application. You will understand the full power of Rust's threads and the synchronization primitives in the standard library. In addition, you will learn how to send information between threads. Finally, you will read about some useful crates that will enable you to implement work stealing algorithms, parallel iterators, and more.
Chapter 11, Asynchronous Programming, helps you understand how asynchronous programming works. Here, you can learn how to develop asynchronous algorithms in Rust, thanks to mio and futures, and learn the new async/await syntax. You can also create asynchronous applications using tokio and WebSockets.
This book assumes some basic knowledge of the Rust programming language. If you are new to Rust, the first few chapters of the official Rust book are a great prelude. Nevertheless, you should have moderate to deep knowledge of at least one programming language; basic knowledge of terminal usage will also be needed.
Having basic knowledge of computer architectures is a plus, along with basic knowledge of high-performance programming in C/C++. They are not required, though, since in this book we will cover all the base theory to understand how the performance improvements work behind the scenes.
You will need a code editor or an IDE to follow the book. Rust has been heavily tested in Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, GitHub's Atom, and IntelliJ's IDEA IDE. I have personally used Atom to write the code examples, but feel free to use your favorite text editor or IDE. You will probably find plugins or extensions for your editor.
In the case of VS Code, Atom, and IntelliJ IDEA, you will find official Rust packages along with unofficial extensions. Personally, I've been using the Tokamak package for Atom.
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