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

Message passing between threads

Concurrency is a powerful feature that enables the writing of new kinds of applications. However, the execution and debugging of concurrent programs are difficult because their execution is non-deterministic. We saw this through examples in the previous section where the order of print statements varied for each run of the program. The order in which the threads will be executed is not known ahead of time. A concurrent program developer must make sure that the program will execute correctly overall, regardless of the order in which the individual threads are executed.

One way to ensure program correctness in the face of the unpredictable ordering of thread execution is to introduce mechanisms for synchronizing activities across threads. One such model for concurrent programming is message-passing concurrency. It is a way to structure the components of a concurrent program. In our case, concurrent components are threads (but they can also be processes...