Book Image

Rust Programming Cookbook

By : Claus Matzinger
Book Image

Rust Programming Cookbook

By: Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust 2018, Rust's first major milestone since version 1.0, brings more advancement in the Rust language. The Rust Programming Cookbook is a practical guide to help you overcome challenges when writing Rust code. This Rust book covers recipes for configuring Rust for different environments and architectural designs, and provides solutions to practical problems. It will also take you through Rust's core concepts, enabling you to create efficient, high-performance applications that use features such as zero-cost abstractions and improved memory management. As you progress, you'll delve into more advanced topics, including channels and actors, for building scalable, production-grade applications, and even get to grips with error handling, macros, and modularization to write maintainable code. You will then learn how to overcome common roadblocks when using Rust for systems programming, IoT, web development, and network programming. Finally, you'll discover what Rust 2018 has to offer for embedded programmers. By the end of the book, you'll have learned how to build fast and safe applications and services using Rust.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Shared ownership

Ownership and borrowing are fundamental concepts in Rust; they are the reason no runtime garbage collection is required. As a quick primer: how do they work? In short: scopes. Rust (and many other languages) use (nested) scopes to determine the validity of a variable, so it cannot be used outside of the scope (like a function). In Rust, these scopes own their variables, so they will be gone after the scope finishes. In order for the program to move around values, it can transfer ownership to a nested scope or return it to the parent scope.

For temporary transfers (and multiple viewers), Rust has borrowing, which creates a reference back to the owned value. However, these references are less powerful, and sometimes more complex to maintain (for example, can the reference outlive the original value?), and they are probably the reason why the compiler complains...