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...

The instructions for this recipe are a bit more complex than the others, as we need to manage two separate crates. If your code doesn't compile, compare your version with the one used in the book at https://github.com/SirRade/rust-standard-library-cookbook/tree/master/chapter_five. We need to separate the code into two crates because providing a custom derive requires creating a procedural macro, as indicated by all of the instances of proc_macro in the code. A procedural macro is Rust code that runs alongside the compiler and interacts directly with it. Because of the special nature and unique restrictions of such code, it needs to be in a separate crate that is annotated with the following:

[lib]
proc-macro = true

This crate is typically named after the main crate with the _derive suffix added. In our example, the main crate is called chapter_five, so the crate providing the procedural macro is called chapter_five_derive.

In our example, we are going to create...