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

Pausing thread execution with timers

Sometimes, during the processing of a thread, there may be a need to pause execution either to wait for another event or to synchronize execution with other threads. Rust provides support for this using the std::thread::sleep function. This function takes a time duration of type time::Duration and pauses execution of the thread for the specified time. During this time, the processor time can be made available to other threads or applications running on the computer system. Let's see an example of the usage of thread::sleep:

use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;
fn main() {
    let duration = Duration::new(1,0);
    println!("Going to sleep");
    thread::sleep(duration);
    println!("Woke up");
}

Using the sleep() function is fairly straightforward, but this blocks the current thread and it is important to make judicious use of this...