Book Image

Rust Standard Library Cookbook

By : Jan Hohenheim, Daniel Durante
Book Image

Rust Standard Library Cookbook

By: Jan Hohenheim, Daniel Durante

Overview of this book

Mozilla’s Rust is gaining much attention with amazing features and a powerful library. This book will take you through varied recipes to teach you how to leverage the Standard library to implement efficient solutions. The book begins with a brief look at the basic modules of the Standard library and collections. From here, the recipes will cover packages that support file/directory handling and interaction through parsing. You will learn about packages related to advanced data structures, error handling, and networking. You will also learn to work with futures and experimental nightly features. The book also covers the most relevant external crates in Rust. By the end of the book, you will be proficient at using the Rust Standard library.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

How it works...

Let's start with our intention: we want to create a macro called multiply that accepts an undefined amount of parameters and multiplies them all together. In macros, this is done via recursion. We begin every recursive definition with the edge case, that is, the parameters where the recursion should stop. Most of the time, this is where a function call stops making sense. In our case, this is the single parameter. Think about it, what should multiply!(3) return? It doesn't make sense to multiply it with anything, since we have no other parameter to multiply it with. Our best reaction is to simply return the parameter unmodified.

Our other condition is a match against more than one parameter, a $head and a comma-separated list of parameters inside of a $tail. Here, we just define the return value as the $head multiplied with the multiplication of the $tail. This will call multiply! with the $tail and without the $head, which means that on every call we process one parameter less until we finally reach our edge case, one single parameter.