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)

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Our implementation also employs another optimization: tail call optimization, or TCO for short. In oversimplified terms, TCO happens when the compiler is able to rewrite a recursive algorithm into an imperative one. More generally, TCO is when the compiler can compile a recursive call into a form that doesn't add a new stack frame per call, and as a consequence, can't cause a stack overflow (not the website, but the error). For a good discussion on the topic, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/310974/what-is-tail-call-optimization.

Although Rust doesn't support TCO per se (see the RFC at https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/271), the lower-level LLVM does. It requires the last call of a function to be a call to itself. The last line of inner [40] is a call to inner, so it's eligible for TCO.

This is somewhat hard to guarantee in bigger Rust algorithms, though, as objects implementing the Drop trait will inject a call to drop() at the end...