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)

Serialization and deserialization using serde

Serialization and deserialization are important concepts to understand for any kind of application needs to transfer or store data in a compact manner. Serialization is the process by which an in-memory data type can be converted into a sequence of bytes, while deserilization is the opposite of that, meaning it can read data. Many programming languages provide support for converting a data structure into a sequence of bytes. The beautiful part about serde is that it generates the serialization of any supported type at compile time, relying heavily on procedural macros. Serialization and deserialization is a zero cost operation with serde most of the time.

In this demo, we'll explore the serde crate to serialize and deserialize a user defined type. Let's create a new project by running cargo new serde_demo with the following...