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

Reviewing concurrency basics

In this section, we'll cover the basics of multi-threading and clarify the terminology around concurrency and parallelism.

To appreciate the value of concurrent programming, we have to understand the need of today's programs to make decisions quickly or process a large amount of data in a short period of time. Several use cases become impossible to achieve if we strictly rely on sequential execution. Let's consider a few examples of systems that must perform multiple things simultaneously.

An autonomous car needs to perform many tasks at the same time, such as processing inputs from a wide array of sensors (to construct an internal map of its surroundings), plotting the path of the vehicle, and sending instructions to the vehicle's actuators (to control the brakes, acceleration, and steering). It needs to process continually arriving input events, and respond in tenths of a second.

There are also other, more mundane examples...