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

Chapter 9. FFI and Embedding – Combining Rust and Other Languages

Up until this point in the book, we've discussed Rust more or less in isolation. Rust was intentionally designed to integrate with other programming languages by calling external programming languages through its Foreign Function Interface (FFI) and by being embedded itself. Many modern programming languages offer FFI, easy embedding, or both. Python, for instance, can very conveniently call out to libraries with C calling conventions and can be embedded with a little forethought. Lua, a high-level and garbage-collected language like Python, has a convenient FFI and can be embedded without much trouble. Erlang has a small handful of FFI interfaces but Erlang is not, itself, easily embedded into user-space environments. Amusingly, it's fairly straightforward to compile Erlang into an RTOS image.

In this chapter, we'll discuss calling out to foreign code in Rust and embedding Rust into foreign programming languages. We'll start...