Book Image

Rust Quick Start Guide

By : Daniel Arbuckle
Book Image

Rust Quick Start Guide

By: Daniel Arbuckle

Overview of this book

Rust is an emerging programming language applicable to areas such as embedded programming, network programming, system programming, and web development. This book will take you from the basics of Rust to a point where your code compiles and does what you intend it to do! This book starts with an introduction to Rust and how to get set for programming, including the rustup and cargo tools for managing a Rust installation and development work?ow. Then you'll learn about the fundamentals of structuring a Rust program, such as functions, mutability, data structures, implementing behavior for types, and many more. You will also learn about concepts that Rust handles differently from most other languages. After understanding the Basics of Rust programming, you will learn about the core ideas, such as variable ownership, scope, lifetime, and borrowing. After these key ideas, you will explore making decisions in Rust based on data types by learning about match and if let expressions. After that, you'll work with different data types in Rust, and learn about memory management and smart pointers.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Scope and ownership

In Rust, every data value has a single owning scope—no more, no less. So, what's a scope? The easy answer is that a scope is the place where a block expression stores its variables. Scopes are not directly represented in the source code, but a scope begins when a block expression begins, with a { symbol, and ends when the block expression ends, with } (or when a return statement is run before the block reaches its end). The scope is the chunk of memory where the block's variables are stored.

Every data value has an owning scope, including implied temporary values such as the result of 2 + 2 when we ask Rust to compute (2 + 2) * 3.

When Rust is done with a scope, all of the data values that scope owns are discarded and the memory that was used to store them is freed up for other uses. This includes memory that was allocated on the heap, which...