Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

By : Claus Matzinger
Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

By: Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust has come a long way and is now utilized in several contexts. Its key strengths are its software infrastructure and resource-constrained applications, including desktop applications, servers, and performance-critical applications, not forgetting its importance in systems' programming. This book will be your guide as it takes you through implementing classic data structures and algorithms in Rust, helping you to get up and running as a confident Rust programmer. The book begins with an introduction to Rust data structures and algorithms, while also covering essential language constructs. You will learn how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You will also learn how to implement sorting and searching algorithms. You will learn how to attain high performance by implementing algorithms to string data types and implement hash structures in algorithm design. The book will examine algorithm analysis, including Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Divide and Conquer algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

Lists are everywhere! While this is true, it's a fact that makes everything harder. Which list is the right tool for the job? How well will it do at certain sizes to add and later find elements? What's the overhead if my payload size is really small?

These are all questions that programmers are faced with today, and the author hopes to provide some guidance on these decisions. To recap: the least complex is the singly linked list, upon which the doubly linked list is built. Skip lists are in essence multilayered singly linked lists that provide excellent search performance at the cost of memory overhead. Last, but not least, there is the dynamic array—a type of list that wraps and manages an array for storing data just like a list.

Implementing these structures in Rust requires many pointers to the heap, especially Rc and RefCells, which were companions...