Book Image

Practical System Programming for Rust Developers

By : Prabhu Eshwarla
Book Image

Practical System Programming for Rust Developers

By: Prabhu Eshwarla

Overview of this book

Modern programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Java have become increasingly accepted for application-level programming, but for systems programming, C and C++ are predominantly used due to the need for low-level control of system resources. Rust promises the best of both worlds: the type safety of Java, and the speed and expressiveness of C++, while also including memory safety without a garbage collector. This book is a comprehensive introduction if you’re new to Rust and systems programming and are looking to build reliable and efficient systems software without C or C++. The book takes a unique approach by starting each topic with Linux kernel concepts and APIs relevant to that topic. You’ll also explore how system resources can be controlled from Rust. As you progress, you’ll delve into advanced topics. You’ll cover network programming, focusing on aspects such as working with low-level network primitives and protocols in Rust, before going on to learn how to use and compile Rust with WebAssembly. Later chapters will take you through practical code examples and projects to help you build on your knowledge. By the end of this Rust programming book, you will be equipped with practical skills to write systems software tools, libraries, and utilities in Rust.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with System Programming in Rust
6
Section 2: Managing and Controlling System Resources in Rust
12
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Handling I/O and environment variables

In this section, we'll look at how to handle I/O with child processes, and also learn to set and clear environment variables for the child process.

Why would we need this?

Take the example of a load balancer that is tasked with spawning new workers (Unix processes) in response to incoming requests. Let's assume the new worker process reads configuration parameters from environment variables to perform its tasks. The load balancer process then would need to spawn the worker process and also set its environment variables. Likewise, there may be another situation where the parent process wants to read a child process's standard output or standard error and route it to a log file. Let's understand how to perform such activities in Rust. We'll start with handling the I/O of the child process.

Handling the I/O of child processes

Standard input (stdin), standard output (stdout), and standard error (stderr) are...