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)

Pointer types in Rust

Our tale about memory management would be incomplete if we didn't include pointers in the discussion, which are the primary way to manipulate memory in any low level language. Pointers are simply variables that point to memory locations in the process's address space. In Rust, we deal with three kinds of pointers.

References – safe pointers

These pointers are already familiar to you from the borrowing section. References are like pointers in C, but they are checked for correctness. They can never be null and always point to some data owned by any variable. The data they point to can either be on the stack or on the heap, or the data segment of the binary. They are created using the &amp...