Book Image

Mastering Rust - Second Edition

By : Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta
Book Image

Mastering Rust - Second Edition

By: Rahul Sharma, Vesa Kaihlavirta

Overview of this book

Rust is an empowering language that provides a rare combination of safety, speed, and zero-cost abstractions. Mastering Rust – Second Edition is filled with clear and simple explanations of the language features along with real-world examples, showing you how you can build robust, scalable, and reliable programs. This second edition of the book improves upon the previous one and touches on all aspects that make Rust a great language. We have included the features from latest Rust 2018 edition such as the new module system, the smarter compiler, helpful error messages, and the stable procedural macros. You’ll learn how Rust can be used for systems programming, network programming, and even on the web. You’ll also learn techniques such as writing memory-safe code, building idiomatic Rust libraries, writing efficient asynchronous networking code, and advanced macros. The book contains a mix of theory and hands-on tasks so you acquire the skills as well as the knowledge, and it also provides exercises to hammer the concepts in. After reading this book, you will be able to implement Rust for your enterprise projects, write better tests and documentation, design for performance, and write idiomatic Rust code.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Memory management and its kinds

The RAM in your computer is a limited resource and is shared by all running programs. It's a necessity that when a program is done executing its instructions, it is expected to release any memory used so that the OS can reclaim it and hand it to other processes. When we talk about memory management, a prominent aspect we care about is the reclamation of used memory and how that happens. The level of management required in deallocating used memory is different in different languages. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages relied on manual memory management, which required the programmer to call memory allocator APIs such as malloc and free in code to allocate and deallocate memory, respectively. Around 1959, John McCarthy, the creator of Lisp, invented Garbage Collectors (GC), a form of automatic memory management and...