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)

Referencing with explicit lifetimes

Lifetimes are common in many languages and typically decide whether a variable is available outside the scope. In Rust, the situation is a bit more complicated thanks to the borrowing and ownership model that extensively uses lifetimes and scopes to automatically manage memory. Instead of reserving memory and cloning stuff into it, we developers want to avoid the inefficiencies and potential slowdowns this causes with references. However, this leads down a tricky path because, as the original value goes out of scope, what happens to the reference?

Since the compiler cannot infer this information from code, you have to help it and annotate the code so it can go and check for proper usage. Let's see what this looks like.

How to do it...

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