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

Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed the basics of processes in Unix-like operating systems. We learned how to spawn a child process, interact with its standard input and standard output, and execute a command with its arguments. We also saw how to set and clear environment variables. We looked at the various ways to terminate a process on error conditions, and how to detect and handle external signals. We finally wrote a shell program in Rust that can execute the standard Unix commands, but also accept a couple of commands in a natural-language format. We also handled a set of errors to make the program more robust.

Continuing on the topic of managing system resources, in the next chapter, we will learn how to manage threads of a process and build concurrent systems programs in Rust.