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)

What is metaprogramming?

"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

– Alan Kay

Any program, regardless of the language used, contains two entities: data and instructions that manipulate the data. The usual flow of a program is mostly concerned with manipulating data. The issue with instructions, though, is that once you write them, it's like they've been carved into stone, and so they are non-malleable. It would be more enabling if we could treat instructions as data and generate new instructions using code. Metaprogramming provides exactly that!

It's a programming technique where you can write code that has the ability to generate new code. Depending on the language, it can be approached in two ways: at runtime or at compile time. Runtime metaprogramming is available in dynamic languages such as Python, Javascript, and Lisp....