Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By : Brian L. Troutwine
Book Image

Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

By: Brian L. Troutwine

Overview of this book

Most programming languages can really complicate things, especially with regard to unsafe memory access. The burden on you, the programmer, lies across two domains: understanding the modern machine and your language's pain-points. This book will teach you to how to manage program performance on modern machines and build fast, memory-safe, and concurrent software in Rust. It starts with the fundamentals of Rust and discusses machine architecture concepts. You will be taken through ways to measure and improve the performance of Rust code systematically and how to write collections with confidence. You will learn about the Sync and Send traits applied to threads, and coordinate thread execution with locks, atomic primitives, data-parallelism, and more. The book will show you how to efficiently embed Rust in C++ code and explore the functionalities of various crates for multithreaded applications. It explores implementations in depth. You will know how a mutex works and build several yourself. You will master radically different approaches that exist in the ecosystem for structuring and managing high-scale systems. By the end of the book, you will feel comfortable with designing safe, consistent, parallel, and high-performance applications in Rust.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Should I use unsafe?


It's not uncommon to hear some variant of the following position—I won't use any library that has anunsafeblock in it. The reasoning behind this position is that unsafe, well, advertises that the crate is potentially unsafe and might crash your otherwise carefully crafted program. That's true—kind of. As we've seen in this book, it's entirely possible to put together a project using unsafe that is totally safe at runtime. We've also seen that it's entirely possible to put together a project without unsafe blocks that flame out at runtime. The existence or absence of unsafe blocks shouldn't reduce the original programmer's responsibilities for due diligence—writing tests, probing the implementation with fuzzing tools, and so on. Moreover, the existence or absence of unsafe blocks does not relieve the user of a crate from that same responsibility. Any software, at some level, should be considered suspect unless otherwise demonstrated to be safe.

Go ahead and use the unsafe...