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

Chaining and iterators over I/O

In this section, we'll look at how to use iterators and chaining with the std::io module.

Many of the data structures provided by the std::io module have built-in iterators. Iterators let you process a series of items, such as lines in a file or incoming network connections on a port. They provide a nicer mechanism compared to while and for loops. Here is an example of using the lines() iterator with the BufReader struct, which is a part of the std::io module. This program reads lines from the standard input stream in a loop:

use std::io::{BufRead, BufReader};
fn main() {
    // Create handle to standard input
    let s = std::io::stdin();
    //Create a BufReader instance to optimize sys calls
    let file_reader = BufReader::new(s);
    // Read from standard input line-by-line
    for single_line in file_reader.lines(...